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DAVID MASSON, LL.D. 

EMERITUS-PKOFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 
IN EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY 

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED 

in grateful acknowledgment of kindly encouragement given 

in years long gone by, and of intellectual stimulus 

received from him by his former student 

THE AUTHOR 



PREFACE 

Since this Volume was in type, I have received some 
additional information which I feel constrained to lay before 
my readers. 

With reference to the Easy Club, I have been favoured, 
through the courtesy of the Rev. Dr. A. B. Grosart, with a 
sight of the complete Minutes of the Club. From them 
I observe that Ramsay was one of the earliest members 
admitted, and that his song ' Were I but a Prince or King ' 
was formally presented to the Club after his admission not 
before, though its rough draft must have been shown to the 
members prior to that event. 

Next, as regards the Editions of The Gentle Shepherd, a 
valued correspondent, Mr. J. W. Scott, Dowanhill, Glasgow, 
kindly calls my attention to two ' Translations into English ' 
of the Poem which appear to have hitherto escaped notice. 
These are 'Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, translated 
into English by IV. Ward, Svo, 1785.' Ward, as Mr. Scott 
states, seems to have been a 'naturalised Englishman' 
residing at Musselburgh. Five years after Ward's pro- 
duction, appeared another, and in many respects a better 
Edition, to wit, ' The Gentle Shepherd, a Scotch Pastoral by 
Allan Ramsay, Attempted in English by Margaret Turner, 
London, 1790.' It was dedicated to the Prince of Wales, 
and its list of Subscribers contains the names of most of 
the nobility of Scotland. Is this not a reliable gauge of the 
popularity of the Poem? 

Edinburgh, March 1896. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

The Family Tree ..... 9 



CHAPTER II 

Ramsay's Apprenticeship ; a Burgess of the Town 

— 1701-7 ...... 23 

CHAPTER III 

Scotland in the Eighteenth Century ; the Union ; 

Ramsay's Marriage— 1707-12 . . .28 

CHAPTER IV 

The Easy Club ; Early Poems ; Edinburgh of Last 

Century— 1712-16 . . . . . 4 1 

CHAPTER V 

The Favourite of the 'Four 'Oors'; from Wig- 
maker to Bookseller; the Quarto of 1721 
— 1717-21 . . . . . -56 

CHAPTER VI 

Ramsay as an Editor: The Tea-Table Miscellany 

and The Evergreen— 1721-2$ . . .68 

7 



8 CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VII 

The Gentle Shepherd; Scottish Idyllic Poetry; 

Ramsay's Pastorals— 1725-30 . . .85 

CHAPTER VIII 

Resting on his Laurels ; Builds his Theatre ; his 

Book of Scots Proverbs — 1730-40 . . -97 

CHAPTER IX 

Closing Years of Life ; his House on Castlehill ; 

his Family; his Portraits — 1740-58 , .112 

CHAPTER X 

Ramsay as a Pastoral Poet and an Elegist . 122 

CHAPTER XI 
Ramsay as a Satirist and a Song-Writer . . 144 

CHAPTER XII 

Ramsay's Miscellaneous Poems; Conclusion. . 154 



ALLAN RAMSAY 

CHAPTER I 

THE FAMILY TREE 

' Ye'd better let me gang doon wi' the wig, Miss Kirsty,' 
said Peggy, the ' serving-lass ' in the household of Mr. 
James Ross, writer, of the Castlehill. 

'Oh no ! I'd as leif take it doon mysel' to Allan 
Ramsay's, for the sake o' the walk and the bit crack 
wi' the canty callant,' replied the young lady, a blush 
crimsoning her fair, rounded cheek. 

And Peggy would retire from these periodical but 
good-humoured passages-at-arms, with a knowing smile 
on her face, to confide the fact, mayhap, — of course as a 
profound secret, — to her cronies in the same stair, that 
Miss Kirsty Ross was 'unco ta'en up wi' that spruce 
genty wigmaker, Maister Allan Ramsay, doon ayont the 
Tron Kirk.' 

Yea ! verily, it was a love drama, but as yet only in 
the first scene of the first act. The ' Miss Kirsty ' of 
the brief dialogue recorded above — for the authenticity 
of which there is abundant evidence — was Miss Christian 
Ross, eldest daughter of Mr. James Ross, a lawyer of 
some repute in his day, whose practice lay largely in the 



io FAMOUS SCOTS 

Bailie's and Sheriff's Courts, and with minor cases in the 
Justiciary Court, but not with civil business before the 
Court of Session, an honour rigorously reserved for the 
members of that close Corporation — the Writers to His 
Majesty's Signet. 

But though not belonging, in slang phrase, 'to the 
upper crust' of the legal fraternity, James Ross was a 
man of some social consideration. Though he appears to 
have had a strain of the fashionable Pharisee in him, and 
to have esteemed gentle birth as covering any multitude 
of sins and peccadilloes, he manifested, throughout his 
intercourse with Ramsay, certain countervailing virtues 
that render him dear to the lovers of the poet. He 
made distinct pretensions to the possession of culture 
and a love of belles-lettres. To the best Edinburgh 
society of the period he and his had the entree, while 
his house in Blair's Close, on the southern slope of the 
Castlehill, was the rendezvous for most of the literati of 
the city, as well as for the beaux esprits of the Easy Club, 
of which he was a member. 

His acquaintance with the young wigmaker — whose 
sign of the 'Mercury,' situate in the High Street, or, as 
the poet himself writes, ' on Edinburgh's Street the sun- 
side,' was almost immediately opposite Niddry's Wynd, 
and at the head of Halkerston's Wynd, and within sixty 
yards of the Tron Church — had originated in the weekly 
visits paid by him to Allan's shop for the purpose of 
getting his wig dressed. While waiting until this 
important item in an eighteenth - century gentleman's 
toilet was accomplished, he had enjoyed many a 
'crack' with the young craftsman, so shrewd, so witty, 
so genial, yet withal so industrious. The man of pleas 



ALLAN RAMSAY n 

and precepts discovered him of powder and perukes to 
be as deeply interested and, in good sooth, as deeply- 
versed in the literature of his own land as the lawyer 
himself. Chance acquaintance gradually ripened, on 
both sides, into cordial esteem. James Ross invited 
Ramsay to visit him at his house, and there the young 
perriiqirier beheld his fate in Christian, or Kirsty, Ross. 

If Allan were fascinated by Kirsty's rare beauty and 
piquant esfiilglerie, by her sweet imperiousness and the 
subtle charm of her refined femininity, exercised on a 
nature whose previous experience of the sex had been 
limited to the bare-legged Amazons of Leadhills or the 
rosy-cheeked ministering Hebes, whom the high wages of 
domestic service attracted to town ; she, in turn, was no 
less captivated by the manly, self-possessed demeanour, 
and the ingratiating qualities, both social and intellectual, 
of her father's guest. If he had mingled too little with 
society for his manners to be tinged with the polish of 
the debonnair gallant, his natural good -breeding and 
ready tact, united, it must be confessed, to a not incon- 
siderable spice of vanity, doubtless prevented any lapse 
into those nervous gaucheries wherewith a youth's first 
appearance in good society is often accompanied. 

Allan has drawn with truth and graphic power his own 
portrait as he appeared at this time — 

' Imprimis — then for tallness I 
Am five feet and four inches high ; 
A black-a-vic'd, snod, dapper fellow, 
Nor lean, nor overlaid wi' tallow ; 
With phiz of a Morocco cut, 
Resembling a late man of wit, 
Auld-gabbet Spec, who was so cunning 
To be a dummie ten years running. 



12 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Then for the fabric of my mind, 
Tis more to mirth than grief inclined ; 
I rather choose to laugh at folly 
Than show dislike by melancholy : 
Well judging a sour heavy face 
Is not the truest mark of grace.' 

Existing portraits, including the one most valued for its 
fidelity to the original, that by his son, Allan Ramsay, the 
artist (Portrait-painter in Ordinary to King George III.), 
show him to have possessed features that were delicate 
and sharply chiselled, keen dark eyes, a mobile, sensitive 
mouth, a complexion dark almost to swarthiness, and a 
high rounded forehead. To these items may be added 
those others coming as side-lights, thrown on a man's 
character and individuality by the passing references of 
contemporaries. From such sources we learn that his 
face was one whereon were writ large, contentment with 
himself and with the world, as well as a certain pawky 
shrewdness and unaffected bonhomie. This expression 
was largely induced by the twinkling of his beadlike 
eyes, and the lines of his mouth, which curved upwards 
at the corners ; almost imperceptibly, it is true, yet 
sufficiently to flash into his countenance that subtle 
element of humorous canniness which has been accepted 
by many as the prime attribute of his character. He 
may probably have had his own feelings in view when 
he makes his Patie say in The Gentle Shepherd — 

'The bees shall loath the flow'r, and quit the hive, 
The saughs on boggy ground shall cease to thrive, 
Ere scornfu' queans, or loss o' warldly gear, 
Shall spill my rest, or ever force a tear.' 

His figure was thickset, but had not as yet acquired 
the squatness of later days. If in the years to come he 



ALLAN RAMSAY 13 

grew to resemble George Eliot's portrait of Mr. Casson, 
when the inevitable penalty of sedentariness and good 
living has to be paid in increasing corpulence, he never 
lost his tripping gait which in early manhood earned for 
him the sobriquet of ' Denty Allan.' In deportment 
and dress he was ' easy, trig and neat,' leaning a little 
to vanity's side in his manners, yet nathless as honour- 
able, sound -hearted, clean -souled a gentleman as any 
that lounged around Edinburgh Cross of a sunny 
Saturday afternoon. Such was the youth that presented 
himself to bonny Kirsty Ross at her father's tea-table. 

The acquaintance soon expanded into friendship. 
Before long, as has been stated, the household observed, 
not without amusement, that whenever Saturday came 
round, on which day James Ross' wig was sent down to 
receive its week's dressing from young Ramsay, Kirsty 
found she needed a walk, which always seemed to take 
her past the sign of 'the flying Mercury,' so that she 
could hand in the wig and call for it as she returned. 
Ah, artful Miss Kirsty ! As the idyll progressed, the 
interim walk was abandoned, and the fair one found it 
pleasanter, as she said, to pass the time in conversation 
with the young coiffeur as he combed the paternal wig. 
The intercourse thus commenced on both sides, more 
as a frolic than aught else, speedily led to warmer 
feelings than those of friendship being entertained, and 
in the spring of 1711 Allan Ramsay asked the daughter 
of the lawyer to share life's lot with him. 

The lovers were, of course, too well aware of the dis- 
similarity in their social stations to hope for any ready 
acquiesence in their matrimonial projects by the ambitious 
Edinburgh lawyer. To win consent, the matter had to 



14 FAMOUS SCOTS 

be prudently gone about. The position Ramsay's family 
had held in the past reckoned for something, it is true, 
in the problem, but the real point at issue was, What 
was the social status of the swain at that moment ? Ah, 
there was the rub ! All very well was it for a literary- 
minded lawyer to patronise his wigmaker by inviting him 
to drink a dish of tea with his family, or to crack a bottle 
with him over Jacobite plots or the latest poems of Swift 
or Pope ; but to give him his daughter in marriage, that 
was altogether another question. Mrs. Grundy was 
quite as awe-inspiring a dame then as now. James Ross 
and his spouse would require to make a careful investi- 
gation into the pedigree of the 'mercurial' artist in 
crinology — to import a trade term of the present into 
the staid transactions of the past — before such an alliance 
could be thought of. Many and long were the family 
councils held. Every item of his descent, his relatives, 
his character, his prospects, was discussed, and this is 
what they discovered. 

Allan Ramsay was born on the 15th of October 1686, 
in the little town of Leadhills, situate in the parish of 
Crawfordmuir, in the upper ward of Lanarkshire, and in 
the very heart of the bleak, heathy Lowther hills. The 
house wherein he saw the light is now ' a broken-down 
byre,' according to Dr. John Brown in Hora. Subsecivtz. 
Standing, as it does, 1400 feet above the level of the sea, 
the village is chiefly notable as being the most elevated 
inhabited ground in Scotland. The industry of the dis- 
trict, then as now, was almost entirely devoted to lead- 
mining. The superior of the parish was the Earl of 
Hopetoun, and on his behoof the mines were wrought. 
The male population, with but few exceptions, were in 



ALLAN RAMSAY 15 

his lordship's service. A more desolate and dreary 
spot could scarcely be conceived. The rugged ranges, 
destitute of wood, were scarred by the traces of former 
workings, and intersected, moreover, by narrow rocky 
ravines, down which brawled foaming mountain burns. 
Perched like an eyrie on some steep cliff, the view from 
the vicinity of the town is magnificent, ranging over fair 
Clydesdale, and the lands formerly owned by the Earls 
of Crawford, ' the Lindsays, light and gay,' whose ancient 
castle stands on Clydeside. 

In the days of the Stuarts gold used to be found in con- 
siderable quantities in the locality, from which was struck 
the gold issue bearing the head of James V., wearing a 
bonnet ; hence the old term for it — a ' bonnet-piece.' 

The inhabitants of the town and district of Leadhills 
had imbibed in Ramsay's days something of the stern, 
forbidding character of the scenery. The ruggedness 
of their surroundings had evidently sunk deep into their 
temperament, — and ofttimes the teaching of nature in 
situations like this is of the most lasting kind. So it 
was with them. They were a community apart : gloomily, 
almost fanatically, religious; believing in miracles, visions, 
and in the direct interposition of Providence, — in a word, 
carrying to the extreme of bigotry all the grand attributes 
of Scottish Presbyterianism and Covenanting sublimity 
of motive. They married and gave in marriage among 
themselves, looking the while rather askance at strangers 
as ' orra bodies ' from the big world without, who, 
because they were strangers, ran a strong chance of 
being no better than they should be ! 

To this 'out-of-the-way' corner of the planet there 
was sent, towards the close of the year 1684, as 



16 FAMOUS SCOTS 

manager of Lord Hopetoun's mines, a gay, happy- 
hearted, resourceful young Scotsman, by name Robert 
Ramsay. The poet, when detailing his pedigree to the 
father of his inamorata, had boasted that he was 
descended, on the paternal side, from the Ramsays of 
Dalhousie (afterwards Earls of that Ilk). Such was 
literally the case. Ramsay of Dalhousie had a younger 
brother, who, from the estate he held — a small parcel of 
the ancestral acres — bore a name, or rather an agnomen, 
yet to be historic in song, 'The Laird of Cockpen.' 
Whether in this case, like his descendant of ballad fame, 
the said laird was ' proud and great ' ; whether his mind 
was 'ta'en up wi' things o' the State,' history doth not 
record. Only on one point is it explicit, that, like his 
successor, he married a wife, from which union resulted 
Captain John Ramsay, whose only claim to remembrance 
is that he in turn married Janet Douglas, daughter of 
Douglas of Muthil, and thus brought the poet into kin- 
ship with yet another distinguished Scottish family. To 
the captain and his spouse a son was born, who devoted 
himself to legal pursuits, was a writer in Edinburgh, and 
acted as legal agent for the Earl of Hopetoun. Through 
his interest with the earl, Robert Ramsay, his eldest son, 
was appointed manager of the lead mines in the Lowther 
hills, and set out to assume his new duties towards the 
close of the year 1684. 

From this pedigree, therefore, the fact is clear of the 
poet's right to address William Ramsay, Earl of Dal- 
housie, in terms imitated from Horace's famous Ode to 
Maecenas — 

1 Dalhousie, of an auld descent, 
My chief, my stoup, my ornament.' 



ALLAN RAMSAY 17 

But to our narrative. Apparently the young mine- 
manager found the lines of his life by no means cast in 
pleasant places amid the rough semi-savage community 
of Leadhills in those days. He felt himself a stranger 
in a strange land. To better his lot, though he was still 
very young, he determined to marry. The only family 
with which he could hold intercourse on terms of equality, 
was that of William Bower, an English mineralogist who 
had been brought from Derbyshire, to instruct the 
Scottish miners more fully in the best methods then 
known for extracting the metal from the refractory matrix. 
But to Robert Ramsay the chief attraction in the family 
was the eldest daughter of his colleague, Alice Bower, a 
vivacious, high - spirited girl, with a sufficient modicum, 
we are told, of the Derbyshire breeziness of nature to 
render her invincibly fascinating to the youth. Alone of 
all those around she reminded him of the fair dames 
and damsels of Edinburgh. Therefore he wooed and 
won her. Their marriage took place early in January 
1686. In the October of the same year the future poet 
was born. 

But, alas ! happiness was not long to be the portion 
of the wedded pair. At the early age of twenty-four 
Robert Ramsay died, leaving his widow, as regards this 
world's gear, but indifferently provided for, and, more- 
over, burdened with an infant scarce twelve months old. 

Probably the outlook for the future was so dark that 
the young widow shrank from facing it. Be this as it 
may, we learn that three months after Robert Ramsay 
was laid in his grave she married David Crichton, finding 
a home for herself and a stepfather for the youthful 
Allan at one and the same time. Crichton was a small 
2 



18 FAMOUS SCOTS 

peasant-proprietor, or bonnet-laird, of the district. Though 
not endowed with much wealth, he seems to have been 
in fairly comfortable circumstances, realising his step- 
son's ideal in after-life, which he put into the mouth of 
his Patie — 

1 He that hath just enough can soundly sleep ; 
The o'ercome only fashes fouk to keep.' 

Much has been written regarding the supposed un- 
happiness of Ramsay's boyhood in the household of his 
step-parent. For such a conclusion there is not a tittle 
of evidence. Every recorded fact of their mutual re- 
lations points the other way. David Crichton was 
evidently a man of high moral principle and strength 
of character. Not by a hairbreadth did he vary the 
treatment meted out to Allan from that accorded to his 
own children by the widow of Robert Ramsay. To the 
future poet he gave, as the latter more than once testified, 
as good an education as the parish school afforded. 
That it embraced something more than the 'three R's,' 
we have Ramsay's own testimony, direct and indirect — 
direct in the admission that he had learned there to read 
Horace ' faintly in the original ' ; indirect in the number 
and propriety of the classical allusions in his works. He 
lived before the era of quotation books and dictionaries 
of phrase and fable, — the hourly godsend of the penny- 
a-liner ; but the felicity of his references is unquestion- 
able, and shows an acquaintance with Latin and English 
literature both wide and intimate. At anyrate, his 
scholastic training was sufficiently catholic to imbue 
his mind with a reverence for the masterpieces in both 
languages, and to enable him to consort in after years, 
on terms of perfect literary equality, with the lawyers 



ALLAN RAMSAY 19 

and the beaux esprits of witty Edinburgh, such as Dr. 
Pitcairn, Dr. Webster, and Lord Elibank. 

Until his migration to the Scottish capital, at the age 
of fifteen, Ramsay was employed, during his spare hours, 
in assisting his stepfather in the work of the farm. The 
intimate acquaintance he displays in his pastoral with 
the life and lot of the peasant-farmer, was the result of 
his early years of rural labour among the Lowther hills. 
That they were years of hardship, and a struggle at hand- 
grips with poverty, goes without the saying. The land 
around the Lowthers was not of such a quality as to 
render the bonnet - laird's exchequer a full one. As a 
shepherd, therefore, young Ramsay had to earn hardly the 
bread he ate at his stepfather's table. The references to 
his vocation are numerous in his poems. In his Epistle 
to his friend William Starrat, teacher of mathematics at 
Straban in Ireland, he adverts to his early life — 

' When speeling up the hill, the dog-days' heat 
Gars a young thirsty shepherd pant and sweat ; 
I own 'tis cauld encouragement to sing, 
When round ane's lugs the blattran hailstanes ring ; 
But feckfu' fouk can front the bauldest wind, 
And slunk through muirs, an' never fash their mind. 
Aft hae I wade through glens wi' chorking feet, 
When neither plaid nor kilt could fend the weet ; 
Yet blythly wad I bang out o'er the brae, 
And stend o'er burns as light as ony rae, 
Hoping the morn might prove a better day.' 

The boy, meantime, must have been photographing 
on the retentive negatives of his mind the varied scenes 
of rural life, the labours incidental to the alternating 
seasons, which he was to employ with effect so rare in 
his inimitable pastoral. During the winter months, when 



2o FAMOUS SCOTS 

the snow lay deep on hill and glen, over scaur and 
cleugh among the lonely Lowthers, when the flocks 
were ' faulded ' and the ' kye ' housed in the warm 
byres, when the furious blasts, storming at window and 
door, and the deadly nipping frost, rendered labour 
outside impracticable, doubtless in David Crichton's 
household, as elsewhere over broad Scotland, the custom 
prevailed of sitting within the lum-cheek of the cavernous 
fireplaces, or around the ingle-neuk, and reciting those 
ancient ballads of the land's elder life, that had been 
handed down from True Thomas and the border 
minstrels ; or narrating those tales of moving accidents 
by flood or field, of grim gramarye, and of the mysterious 
sights and sounds of other days, whose memory floated 
down the stream of popular tradition from age to age. 
In days when books were so costly as to be little more 
than the luxury of the rich, the art of the fireside 
rhapsodist was held in a repute scarcely less high, than 
in that epoch which may justly be styled the period of 
Grecian romance — the days of ' the blind old man of 
Scio's rocky isle.' At that spring there is abundant 
evidence that young Allan Ramsay had drunk deep. 

To another well, also, of genuine inspiration he must 
by this time have repaired — that of our native Scottish 
literature. Though some years had yet to elapse before 
he could read Hamilton of Gilbertfield's poem, the 
1 Dying Words of Bonnie Heck,' which he afterwards 
praised as stimulating him into emulation, there is little 
doubt he had already caught some faint echoes of that 
glorious period in Scottish literature, which may be said 
to have lasted from the return of the poet-king (James I.) 
in 1424, from his captivity in England, to the death of 



ALLAN RAMSAY 21 

Drummond of Hawthornden in 1649. Without taking 
account of Barbour's Bruce and Blind Harry's Wallace, 
which partake more of the character of rhyming chronicles 
than poems, — though relieved here and there by passages 
of genuine poetic fire, such as the familiar one in the 
former, beginning — 

' Ah ! fredome is a nobill thynge, 
Fredome maks men to haiff liking,' 

— the literary firmament that is starred at the period in 
question with such names as King James L, Robert 
Henryson, William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy, Gavin 
Douglas, Sir David Lyndsay, Alexander Montgomery, 
William Alexander (Earl of Stirling), Sir Robert Ayton, 
Robert Sempill, and Drummond of Hawthornden, need 
not fear comparison with the contemporary poetry of 
the sister land. The greatest name in the list, that of 
William Dunbar, was undoubtedly the leading singer 
of his age in the British Isles, but inacquaintance with 
his works has prevented his genius obtaining that recog- 
nition it deserves. Sir Walter Scott considered Dunbar 
in most qualities the peer, in some the superior, of 
Chaucer, and his opinion will be endorsed by all those 
who are able to read Dunbar with enjoyment. Though 
Spenser's genius may have had a richer efflorescence 
than Dunbar's, if the mass of their work be critically 
weighed, quality by quality, the balance, when struck, 
would rest remarkably evenly between them. Drummond 
of Hawthornden is perhaps the most richly-gifted writer 
in early Scottish literature, as an all-round man of letters. 
But as a poet the palm must ever remain with Dunbar. 

The study of the breaks which occur in the poetic 
succession of any literature is always interesting. In 



22 FAMOUS SCOTS 

English literature such gaps recur, though not with 
any definite regularity — for example, after the death 
of Chaucer and Gower, when the prosaic numbers of 
Occleve and Lydgate were the sole representatives 
of England's imaginative pre-eminence ; and the pen- 
ultimate and ultimate decades of last century, when 
Hayley was regarded as their acknowledged master by 
the younger school of poets. In Scotland, it is to be 
noted, as Sir George Douglas points out in his standard 
work, Minor Scottish Poets, that from 1617, the date 
of the publication of Drummond's Forth Feasting, until 
1 721, when Ramsay's first volume saw the light, no 
singer even of mediocre power appeared in Scotland. 

There were editions of many of the poems of James I., 
Dunbar, Stirling, Drummond, and Sempill, which Ramsay 
may have seen. But he was more likely to have gained 
the knowledge we know he possessed of the early 
literature of his country from the recitals by fireside 
raconteurs, and from the printed sheets, or broadsides, 
hawked about the rural districts of Scotland during the 
closing decades of the seventeenth and the initial ones 
of the eighteenth centuries. From specimens of these 
which I have seen, it is evident that Henryson's Fobene 
and Mahyn, Dunbar's Merle and the Nightingale and the 
Thistle and the Rose, with several of Drummond's and 
Stirling's poems, were circulated in this way, thus becom- 
ing familiarly known in rural districts where the volumes 
of these authors never could have penetrated. On these 
broadsides, then, it must have been that the dormant 
poetical gifts of the youthful Ramsay were fed, and in after 
years he showed his liking for this form of publication by 
issuing his own earlier poems in the same way. 



CHAPTER II 

his apprenticeship; a burgess of the town 
— 1701-7 

As much, perhaps, to obtain release from employment 
so laborious as that on the farm, as from a desire to be 
independent, young Ramsay consented to his stepfather's 
proposal that he should be apprenticed to a wigmaker 
in Edinburgh. 

It has been urged, in proof of Crichton's harshness 
to his stepson, that Ramsay, after he left Leadhills in 
1700, never seems to have had any further intercourse 
with them. Not so much as a chance reference in a 
letter reveals that he ever had any future dealings with 
the Crichton family. But this is not to be wondered 
at. The fact of the death of his mother in 1700 does 
not wholly explain the matter, I admit. But we need 
only recall the exclusive character previously attributed 
to the people of Leadhills, their antipathy to any in- 
trusion upon them by strangers of any kind, to under- 
stand the case. They were a type of Scottish Essenes, 
a close community, akin to the fisher-communities of 
Newhaven and Fisherrow, with their distinctive customs, 
traditions, and prejudices. For a gay young Edinburgh 
spark such as Ramsay, fond of fine clothes, with a strong 
spice of vanity and egotism in his nature, to sojourn 



24 FAMOUS SCOTS 

amongst the dour, stolid, phlegmatic miners, would have 
been to foster the development of asperities on both 
sides, calculated to break off all further intercourse. Met 
they may have, and parted on the terms we surmise, 
but of such meeting no hint was ever dropped, and a 
veil of separation drops between the household at 
Crawfordmuir and the young Jacob who thus was sent 
forth, from the shadow of what was to him the paternal 
roof, to war with the world at his own charges. That 
David Crichton had done his duty nobly by the lad 
was evident; but other children were shooting up to 
youth's estate, and when the elder bird was full fledged, 
it must e'en take its flight from the parent nest to make 
room for others. 

There is another view of the case not so creditable 
to the future poet, but still within the range of possi- 
bility — that the scion of the house of Ramsay, whose 
anxiety to let the world know he was of gentle lineage 
was so chronic, may have felt himself a cut above the 
children of the bonnet -lairdie. Ramsay's nature was 
not one wherein the finer sympathies and delicate regard 
for the feelings of others were mortised into a sturdy 
independence and a desire to carve his fortunes out of 
the block of favouring opportunity. From start to finish 
of his career a subtle egoism, born of his lonely situa- 
tion in life and fostered by his inordinate vanity, was 
his distinguishing trait. Generous acts he did, benevolent 
and kindly on numerous occasions he undoubtedly was, 
but his charity was not altruism. He was not the man 
to deny himself for the good of others. 

Henceforth Edinburgh was to be Ramsay's life's 
home. He was enrolled as an apprentice early in 



ALLAN RAMSAY 25 

January 1701. Although, as an apprentice, he was 
obliged to undertake duties distinctly domestic and 
menial, — for, in those days of strict social and ecclesi- 
astical discipline, a master was expected to discharge 
towards those indentured to him much that appertains 
solely to the province of the parent, — still, there would 
be many spare hours wherein he would be free to devote 
himself to such pursuits as his taste led him. 

What induced him to select wig-making as his life's 
metier is unknown. Perhaps his stepfather may have 
had some friend in that line of business who for ' auld 
lang syne' was willing to take the boy and teach him 
his trade. There is, of course, the other side of the 
question to be taken into account, that the work did 
not demand much bodily strength for its successful 
prosecution, and that it was cleanly, neat, and artistic. 
The recent development of the art of the coiffeur in 
France, in consequence of the attempts of Louis XIV. 
to conceal his natural defects of diminutive stature and 
a phenomenally small head, — defects impairing the effect 
of that majestic mien which the pupil of Mazarin so 
persistently cultivated, — had spread into England, and 
thence into Scotland. The enormous periwigs rendered 
fashionable by Le Grand Monarque admitted of a variety 
of artistic treatment. The heyday of wig-making may 
therefore be said to have extended over at least the 
greater part of Ramsay's career in this branch of trade, 
and in his day the poet was reckoned the most ingenious 
of Edinburgh perruquiers. 

Another consideration probably influenced him in his 
choice to proceed to Edinburgh. The change to lighter 
labour would enable him to filch from hours allocated 



26 FAMOUS SCOTS 

to sleep precious moments for private reading, which 
the arduous nature of his employment at Crawfordmuir 
had prevented. Besides, he was in a ' city of books ' — 
books only waiting to be utilised. That he did take 
advantage of his opportunities during his apprenticeship, 
and that it was at this period that the poetic instinct 
in him took fire, on coming in contact with the electric 
genius of Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and other master- 
minds of English literature, is a fact to which he refers 
more than once in his poems. 

From 1 70 1-7, — in other words, from his fifteenth to his 
twenty-first year, — while he was serving his apprentice- 
ship, there is a gap in the continuity of the records we 
have of the poet ; a lacuna all the more regrettable as 
these were the true germing years of his genius. Of 
the name of his trade -master, of the spot where the 
shop of the latter was situated, of his friends at that 
time, of his pursuits, his amusements, his studies, we 
know little, save what can be gathered from chance 
references in after-life. That they were busy years as 
regards his trade is certain from the success he achieved 
in it ; and that Ramsay was neither a lazy, thriftless, 
shiftless, or vicious apprentice his after career effectually 
proves. That they were happy years, if busy, may, I 
think, be accepted as tolerably certain, for the native 
gaiety and hilarity of his temperament underwent no 
abatement. Whether or not his fashionable Edinburgh 
relatives took any notice of him, whether he was a guest 
at his grandfather, the lawyer's house, or whether the 
latter and his family, hidebound by Edinburgh social 
restrictions, found it necessary to ignore a Ramsay who 
soiled his fingers with trade, is unknown. Probably not, 



ALLAN RAMSAY 27 

for it is matter of tradition that it was the fact of his 
family connections which weighed with Writer Ross 
in consenting to the union of his daughter with a 
tradesman. 

In the spring of 1707 Allan Ramsay received back 
his indentures, signed and sealed, with the intimation 
from the ancient and honourable ' Incorporation of Wig- 
makers ' that he was free of the craft. He appears almost 
immediately thereafter to have commenced business on 
his own account in the Grassmarket, being admitted at 
the same time, in virtue of being a craftsman of the 
town, a burgess of the City of Edinburgh. Though no 
trace can be found that the wigmakers ranked amongst 
the forty-two incorporated Societies or Guilds of the 
city (for their name does not appear), that they must 
have enjoyed the same privileges as the other trades, 
is evident from the fact of Ramsay being enrolled as 
a burgess, the moment he had completed his apprentice- 
ship. 



CHAPTER III 

scotland in the eighteenth century j the union ; 
ramsay's marriage — 1707-12 

An important stage in Allan Ramsay's life's journey 
had now been reached. He was of age, he was a bur- 
gess of the town, he was a member, or free, of one of 
the most influential of the Crafts, or Guilds, in the 
capital, but, greatest step of all, he had started in business 
for himself, and had flung himself, with a sort of fierce 
determination to succeed, into that hand-to-hand fight 
with fortune for the sustenance of life, from which each 
of us emerges either made or marred. 

At a time when all the youthful Ramsay's faculties 
were beginning to be strung to their utmost tension of 
achievement, strange would it have been if that of obser- 
vation were not as eagerly exercised. 

Scotland in general, and Edinburgh in particular, were 

at this period in the throes of a new political birth. The 

epoch of transition commenced in 1707, and ended only 

when the dangers of the repeated rebellions of 17 15 

and 1745 showed the supercilious statesmen by the 

Thames — the Harleys, the Walpoles, the Pelhams — that 

conciliation, not intimidation, was the card to play in 

binding Scotland to her greater neighbour. A patriotism 

that had burned clear and unwavering from the days of 

28 



ALLAN RAMSAY 29 

Wallace and Bruce to those of the exiled and discredited 
Stuarts, was not to be crushed out by a band of political 
wirepullers, by whom State peculation was reduced to an 
art and parliamentary corruption to a science. 

Although the ultimate effects of the Union between 
England and Scotland were in the highest degree bene- 
ficial upon the arts, the commerce, and the literature of 
the latter, the proximate results were disastrous in the 
extreme ; yet the step was imperative. So strained had 
become the relations between the two countries, con- 
sequent on the jealousy of English merchants and 
English politicians, that only two alternatives were pos- 
sible — war, or the corporate union of the whole island. 
Yet in Scotland the very mention of Union was sufficient 
to drive the people into a paroxysm of rage. The 
religious animosity between the two countries was as 
important a factor in producing this feeling as any other. 

English churchmen boasted that with any such Union 
would come the restoration of Episcopacy north of the 
Tweed, and the abolition of the Church of Scotland. 
The latter retaliated by pushing an Act of Security 
through the Scottish Legislature, which demanded an 
oath to support the Presbyterian Church in its integrity 
from every sovereign on his accession. The Scottish 
Whigs and the Scottish Jacobites, despite political differ- 
ences wide as the poles, joined hands in resistance to 
what they considered the funeral obsequies of Scottish 
nationality. For a time the horizon looked so lowering 
that preparations actually were begun in Scotland to 
accumulate munitions of war. 

But the genius, the patience, and withal the firmness, 
of Lord Somers, the great Whig Richelieu of his time, 



3 o FAMOUS SCOTS 

gradually overcame all difficulties, though he was reduced 
to wholesale bribery of the Scottish peers to effect his 
end. As Green puts it : ' The Scotch proposals of a 
federative rather than a legislative Union were set aside 
by his firmness : the commercial jealousies of the English 
traders were put by ; and the Act of Union, as finally 
passed in 1707, provided that the two Kingdoms should be 
united into one under the name of Great Britain, and that 
the succession to the crown of this United Kingdom 
should be ruled by the provisions of the English Act of 
Settlement. The Scotch Church and the Scotch Law 
were left untouched, but all rights of trade were thrown 
open, and a uniform system of coinage adopted.' 

Of all the negotiations for the consummation of the 
Union, Ramsay, doubtless, was an interested spectator. 
Patriotic to his heart's core, and sympathising as a 
Jacobite with the chivalrous feeling of his nation for 
the dynasty they had given to England, and which, after 
only eighty-six years of alternate loyalty and revolt, the 
Southrons had driven into exile, the keenly observant lad 
would follow every detail in the closing chapter of Scot- 
land's history as an independent nation, with a pathetic 
and sorrowful interest. Undoubtedly, while yet an 
apprentice, with a few months of his time unexpired, he 
must have watched the last observance of that ancient 
and picturesque spectacle, annually recurring, but now 
to be abolished for ever — the ' Riding of the Parliament,' 
or the procession of members to the opening of the 
sittings in the old Parliament House. Perhaps he may 
even have secretly gained admission to overhear the 
fiery debates on the Union in that ultimate session of 
the Scottish legislature. Certainly he must have been one 



ALLAN RAMSAY 31 

of the thousands of spectators who day by day thronged 
the purlieus of the hall where the national assembly met. 
Of the rage, brooding and deep, or loud and outspoken, 
according to temperament, which prevailed amongst the 
Edinburgh people at the mere idea of Union with the 
hated 'Southrons,' he must have been a witness. Nay, 
he may have been an onlooker, if not a participant, in 
that riot which occurred after all was over, — after Lord- 
Chancellor Seafield had uttered his brutal mot, ' There 
is the end o' an auld sang,' which gathered up for him 
the gall of a nation's execration for a century to come ; 
and after the Commissioners of both nations had retired 
to sign the Treaty of Union. Not, however, to any of 
the halls of Court did they retire, but to a dingy cellar 
(still existing) of a house, 177 High Street, opposite the 
Tron Church — being nearly torn limb from limb in 
getting there. Then the mob, suddenly realising that 
now or never they must 

' Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen,' 

besieged the cellar, intending to execute Jeddart justice 
or Lynch law on those they esteemed traitors to their 
country. Fortunately there was another means of egress ; 
the party hastily took flight to an arbour in the garden 
of Moray House, where the remaining signatures were 
appended, and whence all the Commissioners fled post- 
haste to England, bearing with them the signed copy of 
the Treaty. 

That stirring time, so pregnant with mighty issues, a 
time when the weal or the woe of the future British 
Empire trembled in the balance, — for what of achieve- 
ment could England alone have accomplished, with 



32 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Scotland as a hostile neighbour dogging her heels ? — must 
of itself have been an education to young Ramsay. It 
both confirmed his patriotism and widened his political 
outlook. 

Yet when the play was over, the curtain rung down, 
and the lights gone out, the lapse of time must to him, 
as to other observers of the period, have driven home 
with stunning force the conviction that the Union spelled 
ruin for Scotland as a nation and Edinburgh as a city. 
For five decades to come a listless apathy, born of 
despair, strangled Scottish enterprise in its birth. The 
immediate effect of the Union was a serious diminution 
in the national trade and commerce. The jealousy of 
English merchants, as it had frustrated the Darien 
Scheme in the previous century, now closed every pos- 
sible avenue of commercial activity for the renumerative 
utilisation of Scottish capital. ' We are dying by inches,' 
wrote James, Earl of Bute, to a friend. And the signs 
of the times did not seem to belie the assertion. 

In Edinburgh, also, the change was severely felt. The 
removal of the Court to London, a hundred and four 
years before, had drawn a large number of the Scottish 
nobility to the vortex of fashion. The money they were 
wont to spend during their stay in Edinburgh, while the 
Court season lasted, was diverted into another channel. 
The town houses which they had been forced to maintain 
in the Scottish metropolis, were in many cases relin- 
quished, and the place that so long had known them 
knew them no more. At that time Scottish merchants 
and shopkeepers had suffered severely, yet they had the 
satisfaction of knowing that the seat of Scottish govern- 
ment remained north of the Tweed. 



ALLAN RAMSAY 



33 



But now a change even more radical was inaugurated. 
The national Parliament, whose sittings had always 
necessitated the attendance of a considerable proportion 
of the nobility and gentry of the country, during a certain 
part of the year, was merged in that of the larger country. 
Those of the purely Scottish peerage, whom choice or 
political duties had retained in Scotland, now found no 
need to maintain their costly Edinburgh establishments. 
Many a noble ancestral home, that for three or four 
hundred years had sheltered the household and retainers 
of families, whose deeds were interwoven with the historic 
records of Scotland's most glorious epochs, was now 
advertised for sale. An exodus to London on a vast 
scale set in, and the capital of Scotland ere long settled 
down, in the apathy of despair, to play the role of a 
provincial centre. Henceforward her 'paper lords,' 
otherwise Judges of the Court of Session, were to re- 
present her titled magnates. 

The bitterness of spirit which such a course of action 
as this migration inspired in the minds of the residents of 
the Scottish capital, Ramsay, as a young journeyman, or 
as a master craftsman who had only newly commenced 
business for himself, would fervently reciprocate. In 
two places at least in his works he pathetically, yet 
vigorously, protests against the cream of Scottish youth 
being sent away out of the country. 

In one of the most suggestively beautiful of his minor 
pastorals, Betty and Kate, he thus writes — 

' Far, far, o'er far frae Spey an' Clyde, 
Stands that great town o' Lud, 
To whilk our best lads rin an' ride, 
That's like to put us wud [mad] ; 

3 



34 FAMOUS SCOTS 

For sindle times they e'er come back 

Wha anes are heftit there ; 
Sure, Bess, thae hills are nae sae black, 

Nor yet thir [these] howms sae bare.' 

And in The Gentle Shepherd, after the discovery has been 
made of Patie's noble birth, his fellow - herd, Roger, 
remarks — 

' Is not our master an' yoursell to stay 
Amang us here? or, are ye gawn away 
To London Court, or ither far afF parts, 
To leave your ain poor us wi' broken hearts ? ' 

The five intercalary years between Ramsay's com- 
mencing in business on his own account and his 
marriage, were those which may properly be designated 
his intellectual seedtime. That he was exercised over 
any of the deeper and more complex problems of life, 
death and futurity j that he was hagridden by doubt, or 
appalled by the vision of man's motelike finitude when 
viewed against the deep background of infinity and 
eternity, we have no reason to suppose. Never at any 
epoch of his life a 'thinker,' in the true sense of the 
word, he was inclined, with the genial insouciant Hedon- 
ism always characteristic of him, to slip contentedly into 
the Pantheism of Pope, to regard humanity and the world 
without as 

' but parts of a stupendous whole 

Whose body nature is, and God the soul, 

— the superficial, ethical principle permeating which is 
summed up in the dictum, Whatever is, is right. Though 
he had no sympathy with the Puritanic austerity of Pres- 
byterianism, albeit a regular attendant on the ministra- 
tions of Dr. Webster of the Tolbooth Church, one of the 
sections whereinto the magnificent cathedral of St. Giles 



ALLAN RAMSAY 35 

was of old divided, he was tinctured neither with French 
scepticism nor with the fashionable doubts which the 
earlier deistical writers of the century, Lord Herbert of 
Cherbury, Shaftesbury, Toland, and Blount, were sowing 
broadcast over Great Britain. In his Gentle Shepherd 
he makes Jenny, when Glaud, her father, had remarked, 
with respect to the prevailing disregard of religion and 
morality among the youth of the better classes, 

' I've heard mysell 

Some o' them laugh at doomsday, sin, and hell,' 

make the following reply, which savours strongly of the 
slippered orthodoxy of The Essay on Man— 

' Watch o'er us, father ! hech, that's very odd ; 
Sure, him that doubts a doomsday, doubts a God.' 

But though he appears to have given a wide berth to 
the ponderous theology, the narrow ethics, and the hair- 
splitting metaphysics of the time, his whole nature seems 
to have been stirred and awakened more deeply than 
ever by his study of the elder poets in English literature. 
Not that their music tended to make him discontented 
with his lot, or unhinged the lid of his resolution to 
become a thoroughly efficient man of business. Ramsay, 
unlike many of his brethren of the lyre, was of an 
eminently practical temperament. Rumour says that in 
earlier boyhood he cherished a desire of becoming an 
artist. But his stepfather not possessing the means to 
furnish him with the necessary training, he wisely 
sloughed all such unreasonable dreams, and aimed at 
independence through wig-making. 

Wisdom as commendable was displayed now. Though 
his studies must have kindled poetic emulation in him ; 



36 FAMOUS SCOTS 

though the vague unexpressed longings of a richly-gifted 
nature were doubtless daily present with him, no thought 
ever seems to have entered his mind of relinquishing trade 
for poetry. On his ambition, also, he kept a steady curb, 
determining to publish nothing but what his more matured 
judgment would approve. Not to him in after years would 
the regret come that he had cursed his fame by immaturity. 

From 1707 until 1711, during the dreary depression 
of the time immediately succeeding the Union, when 
Scotsmen preferred apathy to action, Ramsay sought 
surcease from his pangs of wounded patriotism by 
plunging into studies of various kinds, but principally 
of English poetry. In a letter, hitherto unpublished, 
addressed to his friend Andrew Gibb, who appears to 
have resided at or near West Linton, he remarks : ' I 
have rowth of good reading to wile my heart from 
grieving o'er what cannot be mended now, — the sale o' 
our unhappy country to the Southron alliance by a 
wheen traitors, who thought more o' Lord Somers' gold 
than Scotland's rights. In Willie Shakspeare's melo- 
dious -numbers I forget the dark days for trade, and in 
auld Chaucer's Tales, and Spenser's ' Queen,' in John 
Milton's majestic flow, in Giles and Phineas Fletcher, 
in rare Ben and our ain Drummond, I tine the sorrows 
o' the day in the glories o' the days that are past.' 

That we may accept Ramsay's account of the studies 
of Patie, the Gentle Shepherd, as a type of his own 
is warranted by something more than tradition. The 
internal evidence of his works throws a strong colour of 
probability over the theory. When Sir William Worthy, 
who as a Royalist had been compelled to flee into exile 
during the times of the Commonwealth, inquires what 



ALLAN RAMSAY 37 

were the books his son, whom he had committed to the 
care of Symon, his shepherd, to be reared as his own child, 
was in the habit of reading, the honest old servant replies — 

' When'er he drives our sheep to Edinburgh port, 
He buys some books 0' hist'ry, sangs, or sport ; 
Nor does he want o' them a rowth at will, 
And carries aye a poochfu' to the hill. 
Aboot ane Shakspeare — an' a famous Ben, 
He aften speaks, an' ca's them best o' men. 
How sweetly Hawthornden an' Stirling sing, 
An' ane ca'd Cowley, loyal to his king, 
He kens fu' weel, an' gars their verses ring. 
I sometimes thought he made owre great a phrase 
About fine poems, histories, and plays. 
When I reproved him ance, a book he brings, 
"Wi' this," quoth he, "on braes I crack wi' kings."' 

By the side-light thrown on Ramsay's life from this 
passage we gain some idea of his own studies during 
those years of germination. To the poets more exclus- 
ively Scottish, whether writing in the current literary 
medium of the day or in the vernacular of the country ; 
to Robert SempilPs Life and Death of the Piper of 
Kilbarchan ; to William Cleland's Highland Host — in 
addition to Drummond and the Earl of Stirling, men- 
tioned in the passage quoted above ; to William 
Hamilton of Gilbertfield's verses, The Dying Words of 
Bonnie Heck, and to others of less note, he seems to 
have devoted keen and enthusiastic attention. Lieu- 
tenant Hamilton it was (as Ramsay admits in the 
poetical correspondence maintained between them) who 
first awakened within him the desire to write in the 
dialect of his country — 

' When I begoud first to cun verse, 
And could your "Ardry Whins" rehearse, 



38 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Where Bonny Heck ran fast and fierce, 
It warm'd my breast ; 

Then emulation did me pierce, 

Whilk since ne'er ceast.' 

There was, however, another influence at work, quite 
as potent, stimulating his poetic fancy. Amid the 
beauties of the ' Queen of Cities ' he lived, and the 
charms of his surroundings sank deep into his impres- 
sionable nature. In whatever direction he looked, from 
the ridgy heights of the Castlehill, a glorious natural 
picture met his eye. If to the north, his gaze caught 
the gleam of the silvery estuary of the Forth, with fertile 
reaches of green pasture-land intervening, and the little 
villages of Picardy, Broughton, and Canonmills peeping 
out from embosoming foliage, while beyond the silver 
streak, beautified by the azure enchantment of distance, 
glowed in the sunshine the heath-clad Lomonds and the 
yellow wealth of the fields of Fife. Did the youthful 
poet turn eastward, from yonder favourite lounge of his 
on Arthur Seat, the mouth of the noble Firth, dotted 
with sail, was full in view, with the shadowy outlines of 
the May Island, peeping out like a spirit from the depth 
of distance, and nearer, the conical elevation of North 
Berwick Law and the black-topped precipitous mass of 
the Bass ; while seemingly lying, in comparison, almost 
at his feet, was the magnificent semicircular sweep of 
Aberlady Bay, with its shore -fringe of whitewashed 
villages gleaming like a string of glittering pearls, behind 
which stretched the fertile carse of East Lothian, rolling 
in gently undulating uplands back to the green Lammer- 
moors. Or if he gazed southward, did his eye not catch 
the fair expanse of Midlothian, as richly cultivated as it 



ALLAN RAMSAY 39 

was richly wooded, extending before him like a match- 
less picture, dotted with homesteads, hamlets, and 
villages, past Dalkeith — 'which all the virtues love,' past 
Lasswade, past Roslin's castled rock, past Dryden's 
groves of oak, past caverned Hawthornden, until earth 
and sky seemed to meet in the misty horizon line of the 
Moorfoots ? And westward, was not the eye guided by 
the grassy grandeur of the Pentland Range, until beauty 
was merged in indefiniteness across the wide strath lying 
like a painted scroll from Edinburgh to Linlithgow ? 

Fairer scene never nurtured poet in 'the fine frenzy 
of his art ' ; and in long excursions during his spare 
hours, amidst the silent glens and frowning cleughs of the 
Pentlands, amidst the romantic scenery clothing the 
banks of both the Esks, by Almond's gentle flow, and 
by the wimpling waters of the Water of Leith, our 
Caledonian Theocritus fed his germing genius on food 
that was destined to render him at once the greatest and 
the most breezily objective of British pastoral poets. 

From 1707 to 171 1 thus did Allan Ramsay 'live and 
learn,' — a youth whose nature, fired by the memories of 
Scotland's greatness in years gone by, already longed to 
add something of value to the cairn of his country's 
literature. Such, too, were the facts of which, at his 
request, the worthy lawyer, Mr. James Ross, was placed 
in possession when he was called on to decide whether 
his friend, the 'poetically-minded wigmaker,' should be 
regarded as a persona grata from the point of view of 
a prospective son-in-law. That the ' pedigree ' of the 
young aspirant was accepted as satisfactory may be 
regarded as certain from the fact that the marriage of 
Allan Ramsay and Christian Ross was celebrated during 



4 o FAMOUS SCOTS 

the New Year festivities of 17 12. A woman, at once of 
considerable personal attractions, sound common sense 
and practical knowledge of the world, a capital house- 
wife withal, and though not devoid of a certain modicum 
of literary appreciation, by no means a blue-stocking, 
such, in brief, was the lady who for thirty years was to be 
the faithful partner of Ramsay's fortunes, rejoicing with 
him in success, sympathising with him in reverse — one 
who merited to the full the glowing lines wherein he 
described her. The song of ' Bonny Chirsty ' was 
written after nearly seven years of wedded life. The 
sentiments therein expressed speak better than com- 
ment as to the happiness of Ramsay's marriage. One 
verse of it may be quoted — 

' How sweetly smells the simmer green ! 

Sweet taste the peach and cherry ; 
Painting and order please our een, 

And claret makes us merry : 
But finest colours, fruits, and flowers, 

And wine, though I be thirsty, 
Lose a' their charms and weaker powers, 

Compared wi' those of Chirsty.' 

About a year before his marriage, Ramsay had left 
the shop in the Grassmarket, where he had commenced 
business in 1707, and had established himself in the 
High Street in premises already described, and which 
exist to this day. There, under his sign of the ' Flying 
Mercury,' he toiled and sang, and chatted and cracked 
jokes with all and sundry, from sunrise to sunset, his wit 
and his humour, and, as time rolled on, his poetic genius, 
bringing many customers to his shop. Verily, a sunny- 
souled man, in whom ' life with its carking cares ' could 
never extinguish his cheery bonhomie and self-confidence. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE EASY CLUB; EARLY POEMS; EDINBURGH OF LAST 
CENTURY — I 712-16 

Ramsay's marriage was the turning-point of his career. 
To him, as to every man who realises not alone the 
moral but the social obligations he assumes when under- 
taking the holy charge of rendering a woman's life 
happier and brighter than ever before, the responsi- 
bilities of his new relation crystallised into the mould of 
definite effort the energies hitherto diffused throughout 
numberless diverse channels. Seldom has the philosophy 
of wedded bliss been more felicitously stated than in his 

Advice to Mr. on his Marriage. He remarks, as 

though drawing on the fund of his own experience — 

' Alake ! poor mortals are not gods, 
And therefore often fall at odds; 
But little quarrels now and then, 
Are nae great faults 'tween wife and man. 
These help right often to improve 
His understanding, and her love. 
If e'er she take the pet, or fret, 
Be calm, and yet maintain your state ; 
Au' smiling ca' her little foolie, 
Syne wi' a kiss evite a tulzie. 
This method's ever thought the braver 
Than either cuffs or clish-ma-claver. 
It shows a spirit low an' common 
That wi' ill-nature treats a woman. 
41 



42 FAMOUS SCOTS 

They're of a make sae nice and fair 
They maun be managed wi' some care ; 
Respect them they'll be kind an' civil, 
But disregarded, prove the devil.' 

But for another reason the year 171 2 is as interesting 
to us as students of his career as it was important to him. 
In the early months of it he was introduced to the ' Easy 
Club,' one of those politico - convivial societies that 
sprang into existence early in the century, and were con- 
spicuous features in the social customs of the period, 
until its eighth and ninth decades, when, consequent 
upon the expansion of the city north and south, the 
tavern conviviality of 1 740 was succeeded by the domestic 
hospitality of 1790. 

At the time of which we write, the capital of Scotland 
was virtually represented by the one long street called 
the High Street, or ' Edinburgh Street,' which crowned 
the summit of the ridge extending from the Castle to 
Holyrood Palace, the ancient home of the Stuarts. 
From this main artery of traffic, smaller veins, in the 
shape of narrow darksome closes, branched out, leading 
to a second artery in the Cowgate, and to yet a third one 
in the Grassmarket. During the panic that prevailed 
after the Battle of Flodden, a wall of defence was drawn 
around the town. By it the area of Edinburgh was 
grievously circumscribed. Only what might be termed 
the heart of the city was included, all lying beyond 
falling within the anomalous designation of suburbs. For 
two hundred years this seemingly impassable girdle 
sternly checked the natural overflow of the city's life. 
To reside outside the ports or gates was not only con- 
sidered dansrerous — it was unfashionable. And as there 



ALLAN RAMSAY 43 

was not accommodation for a tenth part of the inhabitants 
in the houses of two, or at most three, storeys which 
prevailed about the time of the Reformation, the 
architects of the Restoration period commenced the 
erection of those towering tenements, or lands, — twelve, 
fourteen, and even sixteen storeys high, — for which 
Edinburgh has been celebrated among the cities of 
Europe. Thus the families of the Scottish metropolis 
were packed together, one on the top of the other, like 
herrings in a barrel, in those quaint old houses, with 
their grim timber fronts, their crow-stepped gables and 
dormer windows, that remain even until to-day to show 
us the circumstances under which our fathers lived and 
loved. 

In circumstances such as these, domestic comfort and 
the sweet seclusion of home were out of the question. 
So criminally overcrowded was the town that well-born 
gentlemen and their households were content with two 
or three rooms, wherein all the manifold duties of social 
and domestic life had to be performed. Robert 
Chambers, in his charming Traditions of Edinburgh, 
relates how the family of Mr. Bruce of Kennet, a 
leading lawyer, afterwards raised to the Bench, lived in 
a house of three rooms and a kitchen — a parlour, a con- 
sulting-room for Mr. Bruce, and a bedroom. The 
children, with their maid, had beds laid down for them 
at night in their father's room, the housemaid slept under 
the kitchen dresser, and the one man-servant was turned at 
night out of the house. Even a more striking example 
of the lack of accommodation was to be found in con- 
nection with the household arrangements of Mr. Kerr, 
the eminent goldsmith of Parliament Square, who ' stowed 



44 FAMOUS SCOTS 

his menage in a couple of small rooms above his booth- 
like shop, plastered against the wall of St. Giles Church ; 
the nursery and kitchen, however, being in a cellar under 
the level of the street, where the children are said to 
have rotted off like sheep. . . . The town was, neverthe- 
less, a funny, familiar, compact, and not unlikable place. 
Gentle and semple living within the compass of a single 
close, or even a single stair, knew and took an interest 
in each other.' 

Such was the kind of home to which Allan Ramsay 
brought his bride. Two rooms, with a closet and a 
kitchen, for many a long year were the extent of their 
household accommodation. Such a state of things was 
not favourable to the development of the virtues purely 
domestic. Hence with Ramsay, as with other men, 
tavern life was accepted as a substitute for those comforts 
the sterner sex could not get at home. As Grant remarks 
in his Old and New Edinburgh : ' The slender house ac- 
commodation in the turnpike stairs compelled the use 
of taverns more than now. There the high-class advocate 
received his clients, and the physician his patients — 
each practitioner having his peculiar howff. There, too, 
gentlemen met in the evening for supper and conversa- 
tion, without much expense, a reckoning of a shilling 
being a high one — so different then was the value of 
money and the price of viands.' 

Mr. Logie Robertson, in his graphic and admirable 
introduction to the Poems of Allan Ramsay in the 
Canterbury Series, adds : ' Business lingered on all over 
the town to a much later period than is customary now, 
but by eight o'clock every booth was deserted and every 
shop closed, and the citizens for the most part gave 



ALLAN RAMSAY 45 

themselves up to cheap conviviality and pastime for the 
next hour or two. Almost every tradesman had his 
favourite place in his favourite tavern, where, night after 
night, he cracked a quiet bottle and a canny joke before 
going home to his family. It was first business, then 
friendship ; and the claims of family after that.' 

Out of this general spirit of conviviality arose those 
numberless Clubs wherein, upon the convivial stem, were 
graffed politics, literature, sport, science, as well as many 
other pursuits less worthy and less beneficial. No 
custom, no usage, no jest, in fact, seemed too trivial to 
be seized upon as the pretext to give a colour of excuse 
for founding a Club. Some of them were witty, others 
wise, others degrading. Such designations as the Cape 
Club, — so called from doubling the Cape of Leith Wynd, 
when half-seas over, to get home to the burgh of Low 
Calton, where several of the members lived ; the Pious 
Club, because the brethren met regularly to consume 
pies ; the Spendthrift Club, because no habitue was per- 
mitted to spend more than fourpence halfpenny, and 
others, were harmless in their way, and promoted a 
cheap bonhomie without leading the burghers into dis- 
graceful excesses. But the Hell-fire Club, the Sweating 
Club, the Dirty Club, and others of a kindred order, 
were either founded to afford an opportunity for indulg- 
ence in riot and licence of every kind, or were intended 
to encourage habits as disgusting as they were brutal. 

Not to be supposed is it that Ramsay had lived six- 
and-twenty years of his life without having practised, and 
we have no doubt enjoyed, the widespread conviviality 
of the period. Hence, though the Easy Club was the 
first of the social gatherings wherewith he actually 



46 FAMOUS SCOTS 

informs us he was connected, we have no reason to 
doubt he had been associated with several of them 
before. In fact, in that poetical ' Essay ' of his which 
stands first in the chronological order of composition, 
though not of publication, the Elegy on Maggy Johnston, 
who died anno 171 1 — an alewife whose little farm and 
hotel were situated in the village of Morningside, just 
beyond the Bruntsfield Links, — he seems to imply that a 
club of some kind met there. The third stanza runs as 
follows — 

' And there by dizens we lay down ; 
Syne sweetly ca'd the healths aroun', 
To bonny lasses, black or brown, 

As we loo'd best : 
In bumpers we dull cares did drown, 
An' took our rest.' 

But to the Easy Club 1 must be assigned the honour of 
having stimulated the nascent genius of the poet to achieve 
something that would convey to its members the fact 
that it was no ordinary tradesman who solicited admission 
into the charmed circle of the Society. James Ross, 
whose zeal for the poetic young wigmaker's social 
recognition was now materially increased, used all his 
influence to obtain for his son-in-law an entree into the 
Club of which he was himself a member. Questionable, 
indeed, it is, when we consider the exclusive character 
of the association in question, the high social position of 
its members, and their avowed Jacobitical tenets, if even 
the influence of James Ross, powerful though it was, 
would alone have secured for Ramsay admission. But 
an inspiration, as happy as it was original, prompted him 
to embody his petition for admission into the Club in 
a See Preface. 



ALLAN RAMSAY 



47 



a poetical address. Such a course was of itself sufficient 
to recommend him to men like Dr. Ruddiman and Dr. 
Pitcairn. The poem, addressed to 'The Most Happy 
Members of the Easy Club,' proceeded, in a felicitous 
strain of gentle satire, blended with genial humour not 
unlike Gay at his best, to plead his own cause why he 
should be admitted as ' an Easy fellow.' His applica- 
tion was successful, and he was duly enrolled as a 
member. The following lines extracted from it will 
exhibit the character of the piece, which takes rank as 
the earliest of his published poems — 

' Were I but a prince or king, 

I'd advance ye, I'd advance ye ; 
Were I but a prince or king, 
So highly I'd advance ye ! 
Great wit and sense are ever found 
Among ye always to abound ; 
Much like the orbs that still move round, 
No ways constrained, but easy. 
Were I but, etc. 

Most of what's hid from vulgar eye, 
Even from earth's centre to the sky, 
Your brighter thoughts do clearly spy, 
Which makes you wise and easy. 
Were I but, etc. 

All faction in the Church or State, 
With greater wisdom still you hate, 
And leave learn'd fools there to debate,— 
Like rocks in seas you're easy. 
Were I but, etc. 

I love ye well — O let me be 
One of your blythe Society ; 
And like yourselves I'll strive to be 
Aye humorous and easy. 

Were I but, etc. 



48 FAMOUS SCOTS 

The benefits received by the self-confident young poet 
were not alone of an intangible character. Praise is an 
excellent thing of itself, but a modicum of pudding along 
with it is infinitely better. To Ramsay the Easy Club 
was the means of securing both. The role of his literary 
patrons was at once assumed by its members. They 
printed and published his Address at their own expense, 
appointed him, within a few months' time, their ' Poet 
Laureate,' and manifested, both by counsel and the 
exercise of influence, the liveliest interest in his welfare. 
No trivial service this to the youthful poet on the part 
of his kindly club brethren. How great it was, and how 
decisive the effect of their generous championship in 
establishing Ramsay's reputation on a sure basis, will 
best be understood by glancing for a moment at the 
character of the Easy Club and the personnel of its 
membership. 

Originally founded, under a different name, as a means 
of frustrating, and afterwards of protesting against, the 
Union, the Club, after its reconstruction in 1711, became 
a Jacobite organisation pure and simple. As Ramsay 
himself stated in after years : ' It originated in the 
antipathy we all of that day seemed to have at the ill- 
humour and contradiction which arise from trifles, 
especially those which constitute Whig and Tory, with- 
out having the grand reason for it.' The grand reason 
in question was the restoration of the Stuarts. To give 
a soupfon of mystery to their proceedings, as well as to 
veil their identity when thus plotting against the ' powers 
that be,' each member assumed a fictitious name, 
generally that of some celebrated writer. The poet, as 
he himself relates, at first selected Isaac Beckerstaff, 



ALLAN RAMSAY 49 

suggestive of Steele and the Tatler. Eventually, how- 
ever, he altered his nom-de-guerre to Gawain Douglas, one 
more in accordance with his patriotic sentiments. 

The membership was limited to twelve, but at the time 
when Ramsay made his application we only know the 
names of five of those who belonged to it. Hepburn of 
Keith, in East Lothian, an antiquarian of no mean 
standing ; Professor Pitcairn, late of Leyden, but at that 
time in the enjoyment of one of the largest practices as 
a physician in the Edinburgh of the period ; Dr. Patrick 
Abercrombie, the eminent historian and antiquarian, 
author of The Martial Achievements of the Scottish Nation ; 
Dr. Thomas Ruddiman, philologist, grammarian, printer, 
and librarian of the Advocates' Library,— one of the 
few Scottish polymaths over and above the Admirable 
Crichton and George Buchanan,— and James Ross the 
lawyer. Tradition has stated that Hamilton of Gilbert- 
field was also one of the 'Easy fellows,' as they dubbed 
themselves, but no confirmation of this fact could be 
discovered. 

We reach now the commencement of Ramsay's literary 
career. For four years— in fact, until the breaking up of 
the Society after the Rebellion of 17 15— all he wrote 
was issued with the imprimatur of the Easy Club upon 
it. That they were proud of him is evident from the 
statement made by Dr. Ruddiman in a letter to a 
friend: 'Our Easy Club has been increased by the 
admission of a young man, Ramsay by name, sib to the 
Ramsays of Dalhousie, and married to a daughter of 
Ross the writer. He will be heard tell o' yet, I'm 
thinking, or I am much out of my reckoning.' 

The next pieces which our poet read to his patrons 
4 



5 o FAMOUS SCOTS 

were two he had written some time previous — to wit, a 
little Ode on the preservation from death by drowning 
of the son of his friend John Bruce, on August 19, 
1 7 10 ; and the Elegy on Maggy Johnston, the alewife, to 
which reference has already been made. The first of 
these bears evident traces of youth and inexperience, in 
both the esoteric and exoteric or technical mysteries of 
his art. For example, when referring to the danger 
wherein the lad and his companions had been placed, 
he remarks — 

' Whilst, like the lamp's last flame, their trembling souls 
Are on the wing to leave their mortal goals ' ; 

and he conjures up the following extraordinary spectacle 
of angelic gymnastics, whereby the rescue of the lads 
was effected — 

' Angels came posting down the divine beam 
To save the helpless in their last extreme.' 

Little promise was visible in that piece of future excell- 
ence, yet within eighteen months he had written the 
Elegy on Maggy /o/inston, to which the critics of the 
Easy Club gave unstinted praise. For humorous de- 
scription of the convivial habits of the day, and graphic 
word - painting, the poem is exceedingly happy. But 
alas ! judged by our latter-day standard of refinement, 
good taste, and morality, it is caviare to the general. 
Only to antiquarians and students of by-past customs 
do its allusions contain much that is either interesting or 
edifying. 

To follow Ramsay's poetic development through all 
his earlier pieces would simply exhaust the interest of 
the reader. Suffice it to say, that, at the request of the 



ALLAN RAMSAY 51 

Easy Club, he wrote an Elegy on the death of Dr. 
Pitcairn in 1713, but the poem contained so many 
political references and satirical quips that he omitted 
it from the collected edition of his works in 1721. 
Pitcairn was a sort of Scottish Voltaire, a man far in 
advance of his time, who paid in popular suspicion and 
reprobation for his liberality and tolerance. What 
Robert Chambers remarks of him is well within the facts 
of the case. ' His sentiments and opinions on various 
subjects accord with the most enlightened views of the 
present day, and present a very striking and remarkable 
contrast to the ignorance and prejudice with which he 
was surrounded. Fanatics and bigots he detested, and 
by fanatics and bigots, as a matter of course, he was 
abused and calumniated. He was accused of being an 
atheist, a deist, a mocker and reviler of religion, . . . and 
one who was twice drunk every day.' Ramsay, in his Elegy, 
rebutted those grossly malevolent falsehoods, not only 
clearing the memory of his patron from such foul dis- 
honour, but with bitingly sarcastic humour he turned 
the tables on the calumniators, by showing, over their 
action in connection with the Union, who in reality were 
the traitors. 

To the instigation of the Easy Club we also owe the 
piece on The Qualifications of a Gentleman, published 
in 1 7 15, subsequent to a debate in the Society on the 
subject. Ramsay versified the arguments used by the 
various speakers, executing the task in a manner at once 
so graceful and witty that the Club formally declared 
him to be 'a gentleman by merit.' Only a periphrastic 
method of signifying their approbation of his work was 
this, and did not imply any reflection upon his birth, as 



52 FAMOUS SCOTS 

might at first glance be supposed. For in the concluding 
lines of the poem Ramsay, with his genial bonhomie and 
humour had said — 

' Yet that we more good humour might display, 
We frankly turned the vote another way ; 
And in each thing we common topics shun, 
So the great prize nor birth nor riches won. 
The vote was carried thus: — that easy he 
Who should three years a social fellow be, 
And to our Easy Club give no offence, 
After triennial trial, should commence 
A gentleman ; which gives as just a claim 
To that great title, as the blast of fame 
Can give to those who tread in human gore.' 

In 1 7 15, also, he amused the members of the Club, 
and after them the wits of Edinburgh, with some lines 
on the current predictions regarding The Great Eclipse 
of the Sun, foretold to take place during April 17 15. 
The following picture, descriptive of the awe and terror 
produced on ignorant minds and on the brute creation 
by the occurrence of the eclipse, is as pithily effective 
in its simplicity and fidelity to life and nature as 
anything in Crabbe's Tales in Verse or Shenstone's 
Schoolm i stress — 

* When this strange darkness overshades the plains, 
'Twill give an odd surprise to unwarned swains ; 
Plain honest hinds, who do not know the cause, 
Nor know of orbs, their motions or their laws, 
Will from the half-ploughed furrows homeward bend 
In dire confusion, judging that the end 
Of time approacheth ; thus possessed with fear, 
They'll think the gen'ral conflagration near. 
The traveller, benighted on the road, 
Will turn devout, and supplicate his God. 



ALLAN RAMSAY 53 

Cocks with their careful mates and younger fry, 
As if 'twere evening, to their roosts will fly. 
The horned cattle will forget to feed, 
And come home lowing from the grassy mead. 
Each bird of day will to his nest repair, 
And leave to bats and owls the dusky air ; 
The lark and little robin's softer lay 
Will not be heard till the return of day.' 

The years 1715-16 were evidently periods of great 
activity on Ramsay's part, for at least five other notable 
productions of his pen are to be assigned to that date. 
To him the revelation of his life's metier had at last 
come, and his enthusiasm in its prosecution was intense. 
Henceforward poetry was to represent to him the 
supreme aim of existence. But like the canny Scot he 
was, he preferred to regard its emoluments as a crutch 
rather than a staff; nay, on the other hand, the deter- 
mination to discharge his daily duties in his trade, as 
he executed his literary labours, con amore, seems to have 
been ever present with him. On this point, and referring 
to his dual pursuits as a wigmaker and a poet, he writes 
to his friend Arbuckle — 

' I theek the out, and line the inside 
Of mony a douce and witty pash, 
And baith ways gather in the cash. 

Contented I have sic a skair, 
As does my business to a hair ; 
And fain would prove to ilka Scot, 
That pourtith's no the poet's lot.' 

During the years in question Ramsay produced in 
rapid succession his poem On Wit, the Club being again 
responsible for this clever satire ; and also two humorous 



54 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Elegies, one on John Cowper, the Kirk-Treasurer's-Man, 
whose official oversight of the nymphes de pave furnished 
the poet with a rollickingly ludicrous theme, of which he 
made the most; the other, an Elegy on Lucky Wood, 
alewife in the Canongate, also gave Ramsay full scope 
for the exercise of that broad Rabelaisian humour, of his 
possession of which there was now no longer to be any 
doubt. 

Finally, in 1716, he achieved his great success, which 
stamped him as unquestionably one of the greatest 
delineators that had as yet appeared, of rural Scottish 
life amongst the humbler classes. As is well known, 
a fragment is in existence consisting of one canto of a 
poem entitled Christ's Kirk on the Green. Tradition 
and internal evidence alike point to King James I. as the 
author. The theme is the description of a brawl at a 
country wedding, which breaks out just as the dancing 
was commencing. 'The king,' says Ramsay, 'having 
painted the rustic squabble with an uncommon spirit, in 
a most ludicrous manner, in a stanza of verse, the most 
difficult to keep the sense complete, as he had done, 
without being forced to bring in words for crambo's sake 
where they return so frequently, I have presumed to 
imitate His Majesty in continuing the laughable scene. 
Ambitious to imitate so great an original, I put a stop to 
the war, called a congress, and made them sign a peace, 
that the world might have their picture in the more 
agreeable hours of drinking, dancing, and singing. The 
following cantos were written, the one in 17 15 (O.S. 
corresponding to January 17 16), the other in 17 18, about 
three hundred years after the first. Let no worthy poet 
despair of immortality, — good sense will always be the 



ALLAN RAMSAY 55 

same in spite of the revolutions of fashion and the change 
of language.' 

The task was no easy one, but Ramsay succeeded with 
remarkable skill in dovetailing the second and third 
cantos into the first, so that they read as the production 
of one mind. For faithful portraiture of Scottish rural 
manners, for a fidelity, even in the minutest details, 
recalling Teniers and his vividly realistic pictures of 
Dutch rustic life, the cantos are unrivalled in Scottish 
literature, save by the scenes of his own Gentle Shepherd. 



CHAPTER V 

THE FAVOURITE AT THE ' FOUR - OORS ' j FROM WIG- 
MAKER to bookseller; the quarto of 1721 — 

1717-21 

Ramsay's fame as a poet, writing in the Scots vernacular, 
was now thoroughly established. Though the patron- 
age of the Easy Club could no longer be extended 
to him, as the Government of the Elector of Hanover 
— lately crowned King of England under the title of 
George I. — had directed its suppression, the members 
of it, while in a position to benefit him, had laid the 
basis of his reputation so broad and deep that virtually 
he had now only to build on their foundation. 

He was distinctly the favourite of the ' auld wives ' of 
the town. In quarto sheets, familiarly known as broad- 
sides, and similar to what had been hawked about the 
country in his youth, his poems had hitherto been 
issued. It became the fashion, when four o'clock arrived, 
to send out their children, or their ' serving-lass,' with a 
penny to procure Allan Ramsay's latest piece, in order 
to increase the relish of their ' four-oors' Bohea ' with 
the broad humour of John Cowper, or The Elegy upon 
Lucky Wood, or The Great Eclipse. 

During the year or two immediately preceding the 

publication of the quarto of 1721 this custom greatly 

56 



ALLAN RAMSAY 57 

increased. Of course, a supply had to be forthcoming 
to meet such a demand, but of these, numberless pieces, 
on topics of political or merely ephemeral interest, were 
never republished after their appearance in broadside 
form. By an eminent collector of this species of 
literature the fact is stated, that there are considerably 
over two score of poems by Ramsay which have thus 
been allowed to slip into oblivion. Not that such a 
fate was undeserved. In many cases their indelicacy 
would debar their admission into any edition nowadays ; 
in others, their lack of permanent general interest. 
Such subjects as The Flytirt of Luckie Duff and 
Luckie Brown, A Dookiii in the Nor" Loch, and A 
Whiggish Lament, were not the kind of themes his 
calmer and maturer judgment would care to contem- 
plate being handed down to posterity as specimens of 
his work. 

In 1719 Ramsay appears to have concluded, from the 
extensive sale his poems enjoyed even in broadside form, 
that the trade of a bookseller would not only be more 
remunerative than a wigmaker's, but would also be more 
in accord with his literary tastes and aspirations. For 
some months he had virtually carried on the two trades 
concurrently, his reputation undoubtedly attracting a 
large number of customers to his shop to have their wigs 
dressed by the popular poet of the day. But as his 
fame increased, so did his vanity. Of praise he was 
inordinately fond. ' Tell Allan he's as great a poet as 
Pope, and ye may get what ye like from him,' said the 
witty and outspoken Lord Elibank to a friend. The 
charge had more than a grain of truth in it. That man 
did not lack more than his share of self-complacent 



58 FAMOUS SCOTS 

vanity who could write, as the vicegerent of great Apollo, 
as he informs us in The Scribblers Lashed, such lines as 
these — 

' Wherefore pursue some craft for bread, 
Where hands may better serve than head ; 
Nor ever hope in verse to shine, 
Or share in Homer's fate or ' 

Alas ! Allan, ' backwardness in coming forward ' was 
never one of thy failings ! 

To Allan, digito mottstrari was a condition of things 
equivalent to the seventh heaven of felicity ; but he felt 
it would be more to his advantage to be pointed out as 
a bookseller than as a wigmaker, when his reputation as 
a poet would cause his social status to be keenly 
examined. We learn that he consulted his friend 
Ruddiman on the step, who spoke strongly in its favour, 
and gave him good sound advice as to the kind of stock 
most likely to sell readily. The 'Flying Mercury,' 
therefore, which up to this date had presided over the 
' theeking ' of the outside of the ' pashes ' (heads) of the 
worthy burgesses of Auld Reekie, was thereafter to 
preside, with even increased lustre, over the provision of 
material for lining the inside with learning and culture. 

That the time was an anxious one for the poet there 
can be little doubt. He was virtually beginning the 
battle of life anew; and though he did so with many 
advantageous circumstances in his favour, none the less 
was the step one to be undertaken only after the gravest 
consideration and calculation of probabilities. But by 
its results the change is shown to have been a wise one. 
From the outset the bookselling business proved a 
lucrative venture. The issue of his own broadsides, 



ALLAN RAMSAY 59 

week by week, was of itself a considerable source of 
profit. These, in addition to being sold at his shop 
and hawked about the country, were disposed of on the 
streets of Edinburgh by itinerant stallkeepers, who were 
wont to regard the fact as one of great moment to 
themselves when they could cry, 'Ane o' Maister 
Ramsay's new poems — price a penny.' In this manner 
his famous piece, The City of Edinburgh 's Address to the 
Country, was sown broadcast over the county. 

Meantime, while Ramsay's literary and commercial 
prosperity was being established on so firm a basis, he 
was becoming quite a family man. The little house 
opposite Niddry's Wynd was gradually getting small 
enough for his increasing menage. Since his marriage 
in 17 1 2, happiness almost idyllic, as he records, had 
been his lot in his domestic relations. He had experi- 
enced the pure joy that thrills through a parent's heart 
on hearing little toddling feet pattering through his 
house, and sweet childish voices lisping the name 
' father.' The following entries in the Register of 
Births and Baptisms for the City of Edinburgh speak for 
themselves : — 

'At Edinburgh, 6th October 171 3. 

'Registrate to Allan Ramsay, periwige-maker, and 
Christian Ross, his spouse, New Kirk Parish — a son, 
Allan. Witnesses, John Symer, William Mitchell, and 
Robert Mein, merchant, burgesses ; and William Baxter. 

' Registrate to Allan Ramsay, weegmaker, burges, and 
Christian Ross, his spouse, North East (College Kirk) 
Parish — a daughter named Susanna. Witnesses, John 
Symers, merchant, and John Morison, merchant. The 
child was born on the 1st instant. 3rd October 17 14. 



60 FAMOUS SCOTS 

' Registrate to Allan Ramsay, weegmaker, and Christian 
Ross, his spouse, North East Parish — a son, Niell. 
Witnesses, Walter Boswell, sadler, and John Symer, 
merchant. 9th October 17 15. 

' Registrate to Allan Ramsay, weegmaker, and Christian 
Ross, his spouse, North East Parish — a son, Robert. 
Witnesses, John Symer, merchant, and Walter Boswell, 
sadler. The child was born on the 10th instant. 23rd 
November 17 16. 

' Registrate to Allan Ramsay, bookseller, and Christian 
Ross, his spouse — a daughter named Agnes. Wit- 
nesses, James Norie, painter, and George Young, 
chyrurgeon. Born the 9th instant. 10th August 

1725-' 

Besides these named above, Chalmers states that 
Christian Ross brought Allan Ramsay three other 
daughters, who were not recorded in the Register, — one 
born in 17 19, one in 1720, and one in 1724, — who are 
mentioned in his letter to Smibert as ' fine girls, no ae 
wally-draigle among them all.' 

In 1 7 19 our poet published his first edition of 'Scots 
Songs,' — some original, others collected from all sources, 
and comprising many of the gems of Scottish lyrical 
poetry. The success attending the volume was instant 
and gratifying, and led, as we will see further on, to other 
publications of a cognate but more ambitious character. 
Almost contemporaneously was published, in a single 
sheet or broadside, what proved to be the germ of the 
Gentle Shepherd — to wit, a Pastoral Dialogue between 
Patie and Roger. The dialogue was reprinted in the 
quarto of 172 1, and was much admired by all the lovers 
of poetry of the period. 



ALLAN RAMSAY 61 

A reliable gauge of the estimation wherein Ramsay 
was now held, as Scotland's great vernacular poet, is 
afforded in the metrical epistles sent to him during the 
closing months of 17 19 by Lieutenant William Hamilton 
of Gilbertfield, to which Allan returned replies in similar 
terms. This was not a poetical tourney like the famous 
' flyting ' between Dunbar and Kennedy, two hundred 
and thirty years before. In the latter, the two tilters 
sought to say the hardest and the bitterest things of 
each other, though they professed to joust with pointless 
spears ; in the former, Hamilton and Ramsay, on the con- 
trary, vied each with the other in paying the pleasantest 
compliments. Gilbertfield contributed a luscious sop 
to his correspondent's vanity when he saluted him, 
in a stanza alluded to by Burns in his own familiar 
tribute, as — 

' O fam'd and celebrated Allan ! 
Renowned Ramsay ! canty callan ! 
There's nowther Highland-man nor Lawlan, 

In poetrie, 
But may as soon ding down Tantallan, 

As match wi' thee.' 

Then he proceeds to inform honest Allan that of ' poetry, 
the hail quintescence, thou hast suck'd up,' and affirms 
that— 

' Tho' Ben and Dryden of renown 
Were yet alive in London town, 
Like kings contending for a crown, 

'Twad be a pingle, 
Whilk o' you three wad gar words sound 
And best to jingle.' 

After such a glowing tribute, Allan could do no less than 
dip deep into his cask of compliments also, and assure 



62 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Gilbertfield that he felt taller already by this com- 
mendation — 

• When Hamilton the bauld and gay 
Lends me a heezy, 
In verse that slides sae smooth away, 
Well tell'd and easy.' 

Then he proceeds to shower on his correspondent his 
return compliments as follows — 

' When I begoud first to cun verse, 
And could your " Ardry Whins " rehearse, 
Where Bonny Heck ran fast and fierce, 

It warmed my breast ; 
Then emulation did me pierce, 

Whilk since ne'er ceast.' 

Three epistles were exchanged on either side, bristling 
with flattery, and with a little poetic criticism scattered 
here and there. In Ramsay's second letter his irrepres- 
sible vanity takes the bit in its teeth and runs away with 
him. He appends a note with reference to his change 
of occupation, as though he dreaded the world might 
not know of it. 'The muse,' he says, 'not unreason- 
ably angry, puts me here in mind of the favours she had 
done by bringing me from stalking over bogs or wild 
marshes, to lift my head a little brisker among the polite 
world, which could never have been acquired by the low 
movements of a mechanic' He was a bookseller now, 
of course, and could afford to look down on wigmakers 
as base mechanics ! His lovableness and generosity 
notwithstanding, Ramsay's vanity and self-complacency 
meets us at every turn. To omit mentioning it would 
be to present an unfaithful portrait of the honest poet. 
On the other hand, justice compels one to state that, if 
vain, he was neither jealous nor ungenerous. He was 



ALLAN RAMSAY 63 

always ready to recognise the merits of others, and his 
egoism was not selfishness. Though he might not care 
to deny himself to his own despite for the good of others, 
he was perfectly ready to assist his neighbour when his 
own and his family's needs had been satisfied. 

At this time, also, Sir William Scott of Thirlestane, 
Bart, a contemporary Latin poet, as Chalmers records, 
of no inconsiderable powers, hailed Ramsay as one of 
the genuine poets whose images adorned the temple of 
Apollo. In the ' Poemata D. Gulielmi Scoti de Thirle- 
stane,' printed along with the ' Selecta Poemata Archi- 
baldi Pitcarnii' (Edinburgh, 1727), the following lines 
occur — 

' Effigies Allani Ramscei, Poetce Scoti, inter cceteras Poet arum 
Imagines in Templo Apollinis suspensa : 

Ductam Parrhasia videtis arte 

Allani effigiem, favente Phcebo, 

Qui Scotos numeros suos, novoque 

Priscam restituit vigore linguam. 

Hanc Phoebus tabulam, hanc novem sorores 

Suspendunt lepidis jocis dicatam : 

Gaudete, O Veneres, Cupidinesque, 

Omnes illecebrae, facetiseque, 

Plausus edite ; nunc in sede Phcebi 

Splendet conspicuo decore, vestri 

Allani referens tabella vultus.' 

As much as any other, this testimony evinces how rapidly 
our poet's reputation had increased. 

At last, in the spring of 1720, Allan Ramsay came 
before the public, and challenged it to endorse its 
favourable estimate of his fugitive pieces by subscribing 
to a volume of his collected poems, ' with some new, 
not heretofore printed.' As Chambers remarks : ' The 
estimation in which the poet was now held was clearly 



64 FAMOUS SCOTS 

demonstrated by the rapid filling up of a list of sub- 
scribers, containing the names of all that were eminent 
for talents, learning, or dignity in Scotland.' The 
volume, a handsome quarto, printed by Ruddiman, and 
ornamented by a portrait of the author, from the pencil 
of his friend Smibert, was published in the succeeding 
year, and the fortunate poet realised four hundred guineas 
by the speculation. Pope, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Gay 
were amongst his English subscribers. 

The quarto of 1721 may be said to have closed 
the youthful period in the development of Ramsay's 
genius. Slow, indeed, was that development. He was 
now thirty-five years of age, and while he had produced 
many excellent pieces calculated to have made the name 
of any mediocre writer, he had, as yet, given the world 
nothing that could be classed as a work of genius. His 
sketches of humble life and of ludicrous episodes occur- 
ring among the lower classes in Edinburgh and the 
rustics in the country, had pleased a wide clientele of 
readers, because they depicted with rare truth and 
humour, scenes happening in the everyday life of the 
time. But in no single instance, up to this date, had 
he produced a work that would live in the minds of the 
people as expressive of those deep, and, by them, in- 
communicable feelings that go to the composition of 
class differences. 

As a literary artist, Ramsay was destined to develop 
into a genre painter of unsurpassed fidelity to nature. 
As yet, however, that which was to be the distinctive 
characteristic of his pictures had not dawned upon his 
mind. But the time was rapidly approaching. Already 
the first glimmerings of apprehension are to be detected 



ALLAN RAMSAY 65 

in his tentative endeavours to realise his metier in the 
pastoral dialogue of Patie and Roger republished in his 
volume. 

The quarto of 1721 contained, moreover, several 
pieces that had not been previously printed. These we 
will at present only mention en passant, reserving critical 
analysis for our closing chapters. Not the least notice- 
able of the poems in the volume are those wherein he 
lays aside his panoply of strength, — the ' blythe braid 
Scots,' or vernacular, — and challenges criticism on what 
he terms 'his English poems.' These were undoubtedly 
the most ambitious flights in song hitherto attempted by 
the Scottish Tityrus. To the study of Dryden, Cowley, 
Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, he had devoted himself, — 
particularly to Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad, and 
to the collected edition of the works of the great author 
of the Rape of the Lock, issued in 171 7. He had been 
in correspondence for some years previous with several 
of the leading English poets of the day, and with other 
individuals well known both in politics and London 
society, such as Josiah Burchet, who, when he died in 
1 746, had been Secretary to the Admiralty for forty-five 
years, and had sat in six successive Parliaments. This 
was the friend whose admiration for Ramsay was so 
excessive as to prompt him to send (as was the custom 
of the time) certain recommendatory verses for insertion 
in the quarto, wherein he hailed honest Allan in the 
following terms — 

'Go on, famed bard, the wonder of our days, 
And crown thy head with never-fading bays ; 
While grateful Britons do thy lines revere, 
And value as they ought their Virgil here.' 

5 



66 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Small wonder is it that, stimulated by such flattery, 
Allan should have desired to evince to his friends by 
the Thames, that the notes of their northern brother of 
the lyre were not confined to the humble strains of his 
own rustic reed. 

In the quarto, therefore, we have a poem, Tartana, or 
The Plaid, written in heroic couplets, with the avowed 
desire to reinstate in popular favour the silken plaid, 
which, from time immemorial, had been the favourite 
attire of Scots ladies, but, since the Rebellion of 17 15, 
had been somewhat discarded, in consequence of Whiggish 
prejudices that it was a badge of disloyalty to the reign- 
ing house. Then we have Content, a long piece of 
moral philosophy in verse, and the Morning Interview, 
a poem written under the spell of Pope's Rape of the 
Lock, wherein the very machinery of the sylphs is copied 
from the great English satire. Nor is the ' South Sea 
Bubble/ which ran its brief course from 1718 to 1720, 
forgotten in Wealth, or The Woody (gallows), and two 
shorter poems illustrative of the prevailing madness. 
Epigrams, Addresses, Elegies, and Odes are also included, 
along with one or two of his famous poetical Epistles, 
modelled on those of Horace, and brimming over with 
genial bonhomie and good-humoured epicureanism. In 
this volume, also, we have additional evidence afforded 
how fondly he had become attached to Edinburgh and 
its environs. Scarce a poem is there in the book that 
lacks some reference to well-known features in the local 
landscape, showing that he still retained the love of 
wandering, in his spare hours, amid Pentland glens and 
by fair Eskside. Only with one extract will the reader's 
patience be taxed here. It is from his Ode to the Ph—, 



ALLAN RAMSAY 67 

and is obviously an imitation of Horace's Ode to 
Thaliarchus. All the sunny glow of the great Roman's 
genius seems reflected in this revival of his sentiments, 
albeit under varying physical conditions, well-nigh three 
hundred and fifty lustra afterwards. The lines cleave 
to the memory with a persistence that speaks volumes 
for the catholicity and appropriateness of the thoughts — 

1 Look up to Pentland's tow'ring tap, 

Buried beneath big wreaths o' snaw, 
O'er ilka cleugh, ilk scaur, and slap, 
As high as ony Roman wa'. 

Driving their ba's frae whins or tee, 

There's no ae gowfer to be seen ; 
Nor doucer fouk, wysing a-jee 

The biassed bowls on Tamson's green. 

Then fling on coals, and ripe the ribs, 
And beek the house baith butt and ben ; 

That mutchkin stoup it bauds but dribs, 
Then let's get in the lappit hen. 

Guid claret best keeps out the cauld, 

An' drives awa' the winter soon : 
It makes a man baith gash and bauld, 

An' heaves his saul ayont the moon. 

Leave to the gods your ilka care ; 

If that they think us worth their while, 
They can a rowth o' blessings spare, 

Which will our fashous fears beguile.' 



CHAPTER VI 

RAMSAY AS AN EDITOR J THE ' TEA-TABLE MISCELLANY ' 
AND THE 'EVERGREEN' — I 72 1 -25 

The popularity accruing to Ramsay from the publi- 
cation of the quarto of 1721 was so great that 
his fame was compared, in all seriousness, with that 
of his celebrated English contemporaries, Pope, Swift 
and Addison. No better evidence of the unfitness of 
contemporary opinion to gauge the real and ultimate 
position of any author in the hierarchy of genius could 
be cited than the case now before us. The critical 
perspective is egregiously untrue. The effect of person- 
ality and of social qualities is permitted to influence a 
verdict that should be given on the attribute of intel- 
lectual excellence alone. Only through the lapse of 
time is the personal equation eliminated from the 
estimate of an author's relative proportion to the 
aggregate of his country's genius. 

Nor were his countrymen aware of the extravagance 
of their estimate when such a man as Ruddiman styled 
him 'the Horace of our days,' and when Starrat, 
in a poetical epistle, apostrophises him in terms like 
these — 

' Ramsay ! for ever live ; for wha like you, 
In deathless sang, sic life-like pictures drew ? 
68 



ALLAN RAMSAY 69 

Not he vvha whilome wi' his harp could ca' 
The dancing stanes to big the Theban wa' ; 
Nor he (shame fa's fool head !) as stories tell, 
Could whistle back an auld dead wife frae hell.' 

James Clerk of Penicuik considered Homer and 
Milton to be the only worthy compeers of the 
Caledonian bard ; and Sir William Bennet of Marie- 
field insisted the Poet-Laureateship should be con- 
ferred on Ramsay, as the singer who united in him- 
self the three great qualifications — genius, loyalty, and 
respectability ! Certainly honest Allan would have 
been a Triton amongst such minnows as Nicholas 
Rowe, who held the bays from 1714-18, or 
Laurence Eusden, whose tenure of the office lasted 
from 1718 to 1730, but of whose verse scarce a scrap 
remains. 

Compliments reached Ramsay from all quarters of 
the compass. Burchet, Arbuckle, Aikman, Arbuthnot, 
Ambrose Philips, Tickell, and many others, put on 
record their appreciation of his merits as a poet. But 
of all the testimonies, that which reached him from 
Pope was the most valued, and drew from Allan the 
following lines, indicative of his intense gratification, 
while also forming a favourable example of his skill in 
epigram — 

' Three times I've read your Iliad o'er : 
The first time pleased me well ; 
New beauties unobserved before, 
Next pleased me better still. 

Again I tried to find a flaw, 

Examined ilka line ; 
The third time pleased me best of a', 

The labour seem'd divine. 



7o FAMOUS SCOTS 

Henceforward I'll not tempt my fate, 

On dazzling rays to stare ; 
Lest I should tine dear self-conceit 

And read and write nae mair.' 

His position in Edinburgh society was greatly im- 
proved by the success of the volume. The magnates 
of ' Auld Reekie ' who still clung to the capital their 
forefathers had loved, — the legal luminaries of Bench and 
Bar, the Professors of the University, the great medicos 
of the town, — all were proud to know the one man who 
was redeeming the Scottish poetry of that age from the 
charge of utter sterility. There was the Countess of 
Eglinton, 'the beautiful Susannah Kennedy of the 
house of Colzean,' whose 'Eglinton air' and manners 
in society were, for half a century, regarded as the models 
for all young maidens to imitate. Living as she did 
until 1780, when she had attained the great age of 
ninety-one, she was visited by Dr. Johnson during his 
visit to Scotland in 1773. On that occasion it transpired 
that the Countess had been married before the lexico- 
grapher was born ; whereupon, says Grant, ' she smartly 
and graciously said to him that she might have been his 
mother, and now adopted him ; and at parting she 
embraced him, a mark of affection and condescension 
which made a lasting impression on the mind of the 
great literary bear.' She was one of Ramsay's warmest 
admirers. Then there were Lord Stair and his lovely 
lady, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, then about to become 
Lord Advocate : also, Laurence Dundas, Professor of 
Humanity ; Colin Drummond, of Metaphysics ; William 
Law, of Moral Philosophy ; Alexander Monro (primus), 
of Anatomy, and George Preston, of Botany, all of the 



ALLAN RAMSAY 71 

University of Edinburgh — and all deeply interested in 
the quaint, cheery, practical - minded little man, who 
combined in himself the somewhat contradictory 
qualities of an excellent poet and a keen man of busi- 
ness. Thus the influence was a reciprocal one. His 
poetry attracted customers to his shop, while his book- 
selling in turn brought him in contact with social 
celebrities, whose good offices the self-complacent poet 
would not suffer to be lost for lack of application. 

In 1722 the proprietor of the famous John's Coffee 
House and Tavern, in Parliament Close, off the High 
Street, — which, by the way,'still exists, — was a man named 
Balfour. The latter, who had lived for some time in 
London, had acquired a smattering of literary culture, 
and conceived the idea of rendering his house the 
Edinburgh counterpart of Will's or Button's. He set 
himself to attract all the leading wits and men of letters 
in the Scottish metropolis at the time, and speedily raised 
his house to considerable celebrity during the third and 
fourth decades of last century. To Allan Ramsay he 
paid especial court, and the poet became a daily visitor 
at the tavern. Here he would meet many of the judges 
and leading lawyers, the professors from the College, 
any visitors of note who might be in town ; also Clerk of 
Penicuik, Sir William Bennet of Marlefield, Hamilton 
of Bangour, the poet, Preston and Crawford, the rising 
young song-writers of the day, as well as Beau Forrester, 
the leader of fashion in Edinburgh, who is recorded to 
have exhibited himself, once at least, in an open balcony 
in a chintz nightgown, and been dressed and powdered 
by his valet de chambre as an object-lesson to the town 
dandies how to get themselves up. There, too, among 



72 FAMOUS SCOTS 

many others, he probably met the famous, or rather in- 
famous, John Law of Lauriston, banker, financier, and 
cheat, who was in Edinburgh in 1722, after having 
brought France to the verge of bankruptcy and ruined 
thousands by his financial schemes. A motley crowd, 
in good sooth ; yet one whence our poet could draw 
many a hint for future use. 

The success of the quarto encouraged Ramsay to 
redoubled efforts, and the next six or seven years are the 
period of his greatest literary fertility. In 1722 appeared 
his Fables and Tales and The Three Bonnets, a poem in 
four cantos. In some criticisms of Ramsay the state- 
ment has been made that he owed the idea of his Fables 
to Gay's inimitable collection. That this is an error is 
evident, seeing the latter did not publish his volume 
until 1726. In his preface to the Fables and Tales the 
poet says : ' Some of the following are taken from 
Messieurs la Fontaine and La Motte, whom I have 
endeavoured to make speak Scots with as much ease as 
I can; at the same time aiming at the spirit of these 
eminent authors without being too servile a translator.' 
Ramsay took as his prototypes in this species of com- 
position, Phaedrus, La Fontaine, and Desbillons, rather 
than ^Esop. Many of the incidents he drew from 
occurrences in the everyday life around him. For 
example, JtipiteSs Lottery has obvious reference to the 
South Sea Bubble lotteries ; while The Ass and the Brock 
was thought at the time to be a sly skit on the addle-pated 
Commissioners Walpole had that year sent up to Scot- 
land to nip northern Jacobitism in the bud. 

Ramsay's Tales in verse contain some of his daintiest 
though not his strongest work. He makes no claim to 



ALLAN RAMSAY 73 

originality with respect to them, but admits they are 
drawn in many cases from La Motte and other sources. 
In his preface he says : ' If my manner of expressing a 
design already invented have any particularity that is 
agreeable, good judges will allow such imitations to be 
originals formed upon the idea of another. Others, who 
drudge at the dull verbatim, are like timorous attendants, 
who dare not move one pace without their master's 
leave.' Some of the Tales are obviously modelled on 
those of Chaucer and Boccaccio, but in most of his, he 
insinuates a political or social moral, while they narrate 
the story for the story's sake. The Three Bonnets is a 
satire on his countrymen for being so shortsighted, in 
their own interests, as to consent to the Union. Bristle, 
the eldest of the three brothers in the tale, was intended 
to represent the Tories and Scots Jacobites, who were 
opposed to the scheme, and he is therefore drawn as a 
man of great resolution and vigour of character. Bawsy, 
the youngest, or weak brother, shadowed forth the char- 
acter of those who consented under the persuasion of 
the nobility ; while Joukum, the second eldest of the 
trio, — a vicious, dissipated roue, — stood for the portrait 
of those Scots noblemen who accepted Lord Somers' 
bribes, and sold their country to the English alliance. 
The story ran that their father, Duniwhistle, on his 
deathbed, had, to each of the brothets, presented a 
bonnet with which they were never to part. If they did 
so, ruin would overtake them. Joukum falls in love with 
Rosie, a saucy quean, who demands, as the price of her 
hand, that he should beg, borrow, or steal for her the 
three bonnets. Joukum proceeds to Bristle, and receives 
a very angry reception ; he next repairs to lazy Bawsy, 



74 FAMOUS SCOTS 

who, dazzled by the promises the other makes as to the 
good things he will receive after the wedding, surrenders 
his bonnet, which Joukum lays with his own at the feet 
of Rosie. The latter agrees to wed Joukum, and a vivid 
picture is drawn of the neglected state of poor Bawsy 
after this is accomplished. Rosie proves a harridan, 
leading Joukum a sorry dance ; and the poem concludes 
with the contrasted pictures of the contented prosperity 
of Bristle — Scotland as she might have been had she not 
entered the Union — and the misery of Bawsy, represent- 
ing Scotland as she then was. Somewhat amusing is it 
to conjecture what Ramsay's feelings would be on this 
subject could he for an instant be permitted to witness 
the progress of Scotland during the past hundred and 
thirty years, and the benefits that have accrued to her 
from the Union. 

Amongst his metrical tales, one of the finest, without 
question, is The Lure, a satirical fable or allegory, whereof 
the moral, as may best be stated in the poet's own 
words — 

' shews plainly, 

That carnal minds attempt but vainly 
Aboon this laigher warld to mount, 
While slaves to Satan.' 

The narrative, however, though possessing many merits, 
is too indelicate for latter-day taste even to be sketched 
in outline. 

In 1 723 appeared his poem The Fair Assembly, directed 
against the Puritanic severity of that section of the 
community which took exception to dancing and such 
pleasant amusements, alike for young and old. Nothing 
reveals to us more vividly the strange contrasts in the 



ALLAN RAMSAY 75 

religious life of the time, than the fact that the clergy 
winked at the drunkenness which was so prominent a 
feature in the social customs of the eighteenth century, 
and fulminated unceasingly against dancing. Those 
who indulged in it were in many instances barred from 
sacramental privileges, and had such pleasant epithets 
as 'Herodias' and 'Jezebel' hurled at them. As 
Chambers states in his Traditions of Edinburgh : 
' Everything that could be called public or promiscuous 
amusement was held in abhorrence by the Presbyterians, 
and only struggled through a desultory and degraded 
existence by the favour of the Jacobites, who have 
always been a less strait-laced part of the community. 
Thus there was nothing like a conventional system of 
dancing in Edinburgh till the year 17 10,' when at length 
— induced, probably, by the ridicule cast on the ascetic 
strictness of Scottish social functions by the English 
visitors who from time to time sojourned in 'the grey 
metropolis of the north' — a private association commenced 
weekly riunions, under the name of 'The Assembly.' 
Its first rooms, according to Arnot's History of Edinburgh, 
were in a humble tenement in the West Bow (standing 
on the site now occupied by St. John's Free Church), 
where they continued to be located until 1720, when 
they were removed to Old Assembly Close. In the 
West Bow days it was, as Jackson iells us in his 
History of the Stage, that the Presbyterian abhorrence of 
'promiscuous dancing' once rose to such a height 
that a crowd of people attacked the rooms when an 
1 Assembly ' was being held, and actually perforated the 
closed doors with red-hot spits. 

As affording an interesting picture of the austerity of 



76 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the time, a sentence or two may be quoted from a little 
pamphlet in the Advocates' Library entitled, ' A Letter 
from a Gentleman in the Country to his Friend in the 
City, with an Answer thereto concerning the New 
Assembly.' The author writes : ' I am informed there 
is lately a Society erected in your town which I think is 
called an "Assembly." The speculations concerning 
this meeting have of late exhausted the most part of the 
public conversation in this countryside. Some are 
pleased to say 'tis only designed to cultivate polite 
conversation and genteel behaviour among the better 
sort of folks, and to give 'young people an opportunity of 
accomplishing themselves in both ; while others are of 
opinion it will have quite a different effect, and tends to 
vitiate and deprave the minds and inclinations of the 
younger sort.' 

The Assemblies themselves must have been charac- 
terised by the most funereal solemnity, particularly during 
the regime of the famous ' Mistress of Ceremonies,' or 
directress, Miss Nicky Murray. So late as 1753, when 
the horror at ' promiscuous dancing ' might be supposed 
to have mitigated a little, Goldsmith, who then visited 
the Assembly, relates that, on entering the room, he saw 
one end of it ' taken up by the ladies, who sat dismally 
in a group by themselves. On the other side stand 
their pensive partners that are to be, but with no 
more intercourse between the sexes than between two 
countries at war. The ladies, indeed, may ogle and the 
gentlemen sigh, but an embargo is laid on any closer 
commerce.' 

As might well be supposed, such bigoted austerity had 
no friend in Allan Ramsay. All that he could do he 



ALLAN RAMSAY 77 

did to dissipate the mistaken ideas of the Scottish clergy 
and the stricter section of the Presbyterian Church, on 
the subject of dancing and the holding of the Assemblies. 
In the preface to his poem of The Fair Assembly he 
remarks : 'It is amazing to imagine that any are so 
destitute of good sense and manners as to drop the least 
unfavourable sentiment against the Assembly. It is to 
be owned with regret, the best of things have been 
abused. The Church has been, and in many countries 
is, the chief place for assignations that are not warrant- 
able. . . . The beauty of the fair sex, which is the great 
preserver of harmony and society, has been the ruin of 
many. So places designed for healthful and mannerly 
dancing have, by people of an unhappy turn, been 
debauched by introducing gaming, drunkenness, and 
indecent familiarities. But will any argue from these 
we must have no churches, no wine, no beauties, no 
literature, no dancing ? Forbid it, Heaven ! whatever 
is under your auspicious conduct must be improving 
and beneficial in every respect.' 

His poem is an ode in praise of dancing, and of the 
manner in which the Assemblies were conducted. 
Fortifying his case with Locke's well-known sentence— 
1 Since nothing appears to me to give children so much 
becoming confidence and behaviour, and so raise them 
to the conversation of those above their age, as dancing, 
I think they should be taught to dance as soon as 
they are capable of learning it,' he boldly avows 
himself as an advocate for the moderate indulgence 
in the amusement, both as health -giving and as 
tending to improve the mind and the manners, and 
concludes with these two spirited stanzas, which are 



78 FAMOUS SCOTS 

quoted here as space will not permit us to refer to the 
piece again — 

' Sic as against the Assembly speak, 

The rudest sauls betray, 
Where matrons, noble, wise, and meek, 

Conduct the healthfu' play. 
Where they appear, nae vice dare keek, 

Cut to what's good gives way ; 
Like night, soon as the morning creek 

Has ushered in the day. 

Dear Em'brugh ! shaw thy gratitude, 

And of sic friends make sure, 
Wha strive to make our minds less rude, 

And help our wants to cure ; 
Acting a generous part and good, 

In bounty to the poor ; 
Sic virtues, if right understood, 

Should ev'ry heart allure.' 

But we must hasten on. In 1724 Ramsay published 
his poem on Health, inscribed to the Earl of Stair, and 
written at the request of that nobleman. In it Ramsay 
exhibits his full powers as a satirist, and inculcates the 
pursuit of health by the avoidance of such vices as sloth, 
effeminacy, gluttony, ebriety, and debauchery, which he 
personifies under the fictitious characters of Cosmelius, 
Montanus, Grumaldo, Phimos, Macro, etc. These were 
said to be drawn from well-known Edinburgh roues of 
the time, and certainly the various types are limned and 
contrasted with a masterly hand. To the cultured 
reader, this is the poem of all Ramsay's minor works 
best calculated to please and to convey an idea of his 
style, though at times his genius seems to move under 
constraint, 



ALLAN RAMSAY 79 

But in 1724 our poet showed himself ambitious of 
winning distinction in a new field. In 17 18, as was 
stated previously, he had published a volume of Scofs 
Songs, some of them original, but a large number of 
them adapted from older and imperfect copies. So 
successful had the venture been, that a second edition 
had been called for in 17 19, and a third in 1722. To 
attempt something of a cognate character, yet upon a 
larger scale, Ramsay now felt encouraged. In January 
1724 appeared the first volume of the Tea-table Mis- 
cellany: a Collection of Scots Sangs. The second volume 
was published in 1725, with the note by Ramsay: 
'Being assured how acceptable new words to known 
good tunes would prove, I engaged to make verses for 
above sixty of them in these two volumes ; about thirty 
were done by some ingenious young gentlemen, who 
were so pleased with my undertaking that they generously 
lent me their assistance.' ' Among those young gentle- 
men,' as Professor Masson says in his excellent 
monograph on Ramsay in his Edinburgh Sketches and 
Memories, ' we can identify Hamilton of Bangour, young 
David Malloch (afterwards Mallet), William Crawford, 
William Walkinshaw,' to which we would add James 
Preston. A third volume of the Miscellany appeared 
in 1727 and a fourth in 1732, though, as regards the 
last, grave doubts exist whether Ramsay were really its 
editor or collector. Few compilations have ever been 
more popular. In twenty-five years twelve large editions 
were exhausted, and since Ramsay's death several others 
have seen the light, some better, some worse, than the 
original. All classes in the community were appealed 
to by the songs contained in the Miscellany. That he 



80 FAMOUS SCOTS 

intended such to be the case is evident from the first 
four lines of his dedication, in which he offers the 
contents — 

• To ilka lovely British lass, 

Frae ladies Charlotte, Anne, and Jean, 
Down to ilk bonny singing Bess, 
Wha dances barefoot on the green.' 

In the collection each stratum of society finds the songs 
wherewith it had been familiar from infancy to age. 
Tunes that were old as the days of James V. were 
wedded to words that caught the cadences of the music 
with admirable felicity ; words, too, had tunes assigned 
them which enabled them to be sung in castle and cot, 
in hall and hut, throughout 'braid Scotland.' The 
denizens of fashionable drawing-rooms found their 
favourites — ' Ye powers ! was Damon then so blest ? ' 
' Gilderoy,' ' Tell me, Hamilla ; tell me why ' — in these 
fascinating volumes, even as the Peggies and the Jennies 
of the ewe-bughts and the corn-rigs rejoiced to note that 
'Katy's Answer,' ' Polwart on the Green,' 'My Daddy 
forbad, my Minny forbad,' and 'The Auld Gudeman,' 
had not been lost sight of. For many a long day, at 
each tea-party in town, or rustic gathering in the country, 
the Tea-Table Miscellany was in demand, or the songs 
taken from it, for the entertainment of those assembled. 

The widespread delight evoked by the Miscellany 
allured Ramsay to essay next a task for which, it must 
be confessed, his qualifications were scanty. Nine 
months after the publication of the first volume of the 
Miscellany — to wit, in October 1724 — appeared another 
compilation, The Evergrcne : being ane Collection of Scots 
Poems % wrote by the Ingenious before 1600. It was dedi- 



ALLAN RAMSAY 81 

cated to the Duke of Hamilton, and in the dedicatory 
epistle he informs his Grace that 'the following old 
bards present you with an entertainment that can never 
be disagreeable to any Scotsman. . . . They now make 
a demand for that immortal fame that tuned their souls 
some hundred years ago. They do not address you 
with an indigent face and a thousand pitiful apologies 
to bribe the goodwill of the critics. No ; 'tis long since 
they were superior to the spleen of these sour gentle- 
men.' He had been granted access to the ' Bannatyne 
MSS.' — the literary remains of George Bannatyne, 
poet, antiquarian, and collector of ancient manuscripts 
of Scottish poetry. This valuable repository of much 
that otherwise would have perished was lent to Ramsay 
by the Hon. William Carmichael of Skirling, advocate 
(brother to the Earl of Hyndford), with permission to 
extract what he required. From this priceless treasure- 
trove he drew specimens of Dunbar, Henryson, Alexander 
Scott, Lyndsay, Kennedy, Montgomery, Sempill, Gavin 
Douglas, and others. A similar favour was in 1770 
granted to Lord Hailes when preparing his volume, 
Ancient Scottish Poems. Interesting, therefore, it is, to 
compare the manner in which the two editors respect- 
ively fulfilled their tasks. 

In Ramsay's case the poems he selected from the 
Bannatyne MSS. were passed through the alembic of 
his own brain. Everything was sacrificed to popularity 
and intelligibility. Lord Hailes, on the other hand, 
was the most scrupulous of editors, refusing to alter a 
single letter ; for, as he said, the value of the poems lies 
in the insight they afford us into the state of the language 
at the periods when the various pieces were written. 
6 



82 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Alter them in any degree, even the slightest, and you 
destroy the intrinsic character of the composition. 'In 
making his compilation from the Bannatyne MSS.,' 
continued Lord Hailes, 'Ramsay has omitted some 
stanzas and added others, has modernised the versifica- 
tion and varied the ancient mode of spelling.' To 
offend thus was to render himself liable to the severest 
censure from all literary antiquarians. The fault was 
as inexcusable as would be a trader's in palming off 
shoddy goods as those of the best materials. As an 
example of the ruthless liberties our poet took with the 
text, it may be well to follow Chalmers' example, and 
print side by side a stanza of Ramsay's 'paraphrase' 
and Lord Hailes' severely accurate rendering of the 
opening of Dunbar's ' Thistle and the Rose ' — 

Ramsay, 
'Quhen Merch with variand winds was overpast, 
And sweet Apryle had with his silver showers 
Tane leif of Nature with an orient blast, 
And lusty May, that mudder is of flowrs, 
Had maid the birds begin the tymous hours ; 
Amang the tendir odours reid and quhyt, 
Quhois harmony to heir was grit delyt.' 

Hailes. 
' Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past, 

And Appryll had with her silver shouris 
Tane leif at Nature with ane orient blast, 
And lusty May, that mudder is of flouris, 
Had maid the birdis to begyn thair houris 
Amang the tendir odouris reid and quhyt, 
Quhois harmony to heir it wis delyt.' 

In Dunbar's ' Lament for the Deth of the Makkaris ' 
he not only varied but added several lines, and these 
in the silliest manner possible. For example, at the 



ALLAN RAMSAY 83 

conclusion of Dunbar's noble elegy, Ramsay must needs 
tack on three stanzas, as a prophecy by Dunbar himself, 
wherein the vanity-full poet is introduced as 'a lad frac 
Hethermuirs.' What censure could be too strong for 
inappropriate fooling like the following, coming in to 
mar the solemn close of Dunbar's almost inspired lines ? — 

' Suthe I forsie, if spaecraft had, 
Frae Hether-muirs sail rise a lad, 
Aftir two centries pas, sail he 
Revive our fame and memorie : 

Then sal we flourish evirgraic ; 
All thanks to careful Bannatyne, 
And to the patron kind and frie 
"Wha lends the lad baith them and me. 

Far sail we fare baith eist and west, 
Owre ilka clime by Scots possest ; 
Then sen our warks sail never dee, 
Timor mortis non turbat me.' 

In the Evergreen Ramsay published two of his own 
poems, The Vision (in which the author bewails the 
Union and the banishment of the Stuarts) and The 
Eagle and the Robin Reid-breist (likewise a Jacobite 
poem), wilfully altering the spelling in both, and intro- 
ducing archaicisms into the thought, so as to pass them 
off as 'written by the ingenious before 1600.' He also 
inserted Hardyknute, a fragment, which subsequent 
research has proved to have been written by Lady 
Elizabeth Wardlaw, a contemporary of Ramsay's. 
Although the Evergreen did much to revive popular 
interest in early Scottish poetry, and thus prepare the 
way for Lord Hailes and Bishop Percy, from a critical 
point of view it was worse than worthless, inasmuch as 



84 FAMOUS SCOTS 

many of the errors and alterations appearing in Ramsay's 
specimens of our early Scots literary remains, have not 
been corrected even to this day. 

But though Ramsay, in the estimation of stern literary 
antiquarians, has been guilty of an offence so heinous, — 
an offence vitiating both the Tea-Table Miscellany and 
the Evergreen, — on the other hand, from the point of 
view of the popular reader, his action in modernising 
the language, at least, was not only meritorious but 
necessary, if the pieces were to be intelligible to the 
great mass of the people. Remembered, too, it must 
be, that Ramsay lived before the development of what 
may be styled the antiquarian 'conscience,' in whose 
code of literary morality one of the cardinal command- 
ments is, 'Thou shalt in no wise alter an ancient MS., 
that thy reputation and good faith may be unimpugned 
in the land wherein thou livest, and that thou mayest 
not bring a nest of critical hornets about thine ears.' 

In his Reminiscences of Old Edinburgh, Dr. Daniel 
Wilson thus succinctly states the case : ' Ramsay had 
much more of the poet than the antiquary in his com- 
position ; and had, moreover, a poet's idea of valuing 
verse less on account of its age than its merit. He 
lived in an era of literary masquerading and spurious 
antiques, and had little compunction in patching and 
eking an old poem to suit the taste of his Edinburgh 
customers.' He was no Ritson, — and, after all, even 
Plautus had, for three hundred years after the revival 
of learning, to await his Ritschl ! 



CHAPTER VII 

'the gentle shepherd'; Scottish idyllic poetry; 
ramsay's pastorals — 1725-30 

In the quarto of 1721, not the least remarkable of 
its contents had been two Pastoral Dialogues, the 
one between Richy (Sir Richard Steele) and Sandy 
(Alexander Pope), and based on the death of Addison : 
the other between Patie and Roger, and concerning 
itself solely with a representation of rural life. Amongst 
the best pieces in the volume both undoubtedly ranked. 
In 1723 appeared another metrical dialogue, Jenny and 
Meggy, betraying obvious kinship with Patie and Roger. 
So delighted were his friends, the Clerks and the Bennets, 
Professors Drummond and Maclaurin, and many others, 
with the vraisemblance to Scottish rural life, and with 
the true rustic flavour present in the two dialogues, that 
they entreated him to add some connecting links, and to 
expand them into a pastoral drama. Doubtful of his 
ability to execute a task demanding powers so varied, 
and so supreme, Ramsay for a time hesitated. But at 
length, induced by their advice, he threw himself into the 
undertaking with enthusiasm. In a letter to his kinsman 
William Ramsay of Templehall, dated April 8, 1724, he 
writes : " I am this vacation going through with a 
Dramatick Pastoral, whilk I design to carry the length of 

35 



86 FAMOUS SCOTS 

five acts, in verse a' the gate, and, if I succeed according 
to my plan, I hope to tope [rival] with the authors of 
Pastor Fido and Aminta.' 

On the scenes wherewith he had become acquainted 
during his manifold rambles over the hills and the vales, 
the glens and glades, of fair Midlothian, he now drew, as 
well as from the quaint and curious types of character — 
the Symons, the Glauds, the Bauldies, the Rogers, the 
Madges, and the Mauses — wherewith he had come into 
contact during such seasons. That he stinted either time 
or trouble in making the drama as perfect as possible is 
evident from the prolonged period over which its com- 
position was spread, and the number of drafts he made 
of it. Some of the songs, he informed Sir David Forbes, 
had been written no fewer than six times. At length, 
early in July 1725, prefaced by a dedication in prose 
from himself to the Right Hon. Susannah, Countess of 
Eglinton, and by a poetical address to the same beautiful 
patroness, from the pen of William Hamilton of Bangour, 
the poet, The Gentle Shepherd made its appearance. 

Its success from the very outset was unparalleled in 
Scottish literature up to that date. It seemed literally to 
take the country by storm. By all ranks and classes, by 
titled ladies in their boudoirs, as well as by milkmaids 
tripping it to the bughts with leglins and pails, the poem 
was admiringly read, and its songs sung. Its performance 
on the stage in 1726, only served to whet the public 
appetite. By the leading poets of the day, Pope, Swift, 
Gay, Tickell, Ambrose Philips, and Lord Lansdowne, as 
well as by the most influential critics, Dennis, Theobald, 
and Dr. Ruddiman, the work was hailed as one of the 
most perfect examples of the pastoral that had appeared 



ALLAN RAMSAY 87 

since the Idylls of Theocritus. No less eminent a judge 
of poetry than Alexander Pope considered it in many 
respects superior to the Shepherds' Calendar; while Gay 
was so enthusiastic in his admiration that he sent the 
work over to Swift, with the remark, ' At last we have a 
dramatic pastoral, though it is by a Scot.' 

The first edition of The Gentle Shepherd was exhausted 
in a few months, and in January 1726 Ruddiman printed 
the second, while the third and a cheaper one was called 
for towards the close of the same year. The enormous 
sale of the poem may be estimated by the fact that the 
tenth edition was printed in 1750 by R. & A. Foulis of 
Glasgow. So great was the accession of popularity 
accruing to Ramsay through the publication of The 
Gentle Shepherd, and so rapid the increase in his book- 
selling business, that he found it absolutely necessary to 
shift his place of business, or Scotice dictu, to ' flit ' to larger 
premises, in the first storey of the eastern gable-end of 
the Luckenbooths, a block of towering lands or tenements 
which, until 18 17, stood in the very centre of the High 
Street, obstructing the thoroughfare, and affording a 
curious commentary on the expedients to which the 
burgesses of Edinburgh were compelled to resort, to eke 
out to the utmost the space enclosed within the charmed 
circle of the Flodden Wall. 

At his ' flitting,' also, he changed his sign, and, think- 
ing the l Flying Mercury ' no longer applicable to his 
new pursuits, he adopted the heads of Ben Jonson and 
Drummond of Hawthornden, a sign which in local 
parlance gradually grew to bear the title of ' The Twa 
Heids.' In his new premises also, Ramsay extended the 
scope of his business, adding to the other attractions of 



88 FAMOUS SCOTS 

his establishment a circulating library, the first of its kind 

in Scotland. He entered his new shop in May 1726. 

Sixty years after, the ground- floor of the same land, 

together with the flat where formerly Ramsay was located, 

were in the occupancy of William Creech, the first of the 

great Edinburgh Sosii that were yet to include the 

Constables, the Blackwoods, the Chambers, the Blacks, 

and others of renown in their day. With the Lucken- 

booths' premises it is that The Gentle Shepherd is always 

associated. From them Ramsay dated all his editions 

subsequent to the first two, and there he reaped all the 

gratifying results of its success. 

The poem, which takes its name from the 12th eclogue 

of Spenser's Shepherds' Calendar, whose opening runs as 

follows — 

' The Gentle Shepherd satte beside a spring, 
All in the shadow of a bushy brere,' — 

may certainly be ranked in the same category with the 
Idylls of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, the Aminta of 
Tasso, the Pastor Fido (faithful shepherd) of Guarini, 
and Spenser's great poem referred to above. In The Gentle 
Shepherd Ramsay rises to a level of poetic strength, 
united to a harmony between conception and execution, 
so immeasurably superior to anything else he accom- 
plished, that it has furnished matter for speculation to 
his rivals and his enemies, whether in reality the poem 
were his own handiwork, or had been merely fathered by 
him. Lord Hailes, however, pricks this bubble, when 
dealing with the ill-natured hypothesis raised by Alexander 
Pennecuik — the doggerel poet, not the doctor — that Sir 
John Clerk and Sir William Bennet had written The 
Gentle Shepherd, when he remarks, ' that they who 



ALLAN RAMSAY 89 

attempt to depreciate Ramsay's fame, by insinuating 
that his friends and patrons composed the works 
which pass under his name, ought first to prove that his 
friends and patrons were capable of composing The 
Gentle Shepherd? Not for a moment can the argument 
be esteemed to possess logical cogency that, because 
he never equalled the poem in question in any of his 
other writings, he was therefore intellectually incapable 
of composing that masterpiece which will be read 
after his other productions are forgotten, as long, in 
fact, as Scots poetry has a niche in the great temple of 
English literature. 

To define pastoral poetry, as Ramsay understood it, 
without at the same time citing examples lying to hand 
in the works of our author, is a somewhat difficult task. 
But as reasons of space will not permit us to duplicate 
extracts, and as it is proposed to relegate all criticism to 
the closing chapters of the book, we shall, at present, only 
glance in passing at the great principles of composition 
Ramsay kept in view while writing his pastoral. 

In the Guardian, Addison has stated, with his wonted 
lucidity and perspicuity, those mechanical rules to which, 
in his idea, the type of poetry termed ' pastoral ' should 
conform. He maintained it should be a reflection, more 
or less faithful, of the manners of men ' before they were 
formed into large societies, cities built, or communities 
established, where plenty begot pleasure.' In other 
words, that ' an imaginary Golden Age should be evolved 
by each poet out of his inner consciousness.' Then the 
Ursa Major of criticism, Dr. Johnson, after growling at 
all preceding critics on the subject, and remarking that 
'the rustic poems of Theocritus and the eclogues of 



90 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Virgil precluded in antiquity all imitation, until the weak 
productions of Nemesian and Calphurnius, in the Brazen 
Age of Latin literature,' proceeds to say : ' At the revival 
of learning in Italy it was soon discovered that a 
dialogue of imaginary swains might be composed with 
little difficulty, because the conversation of shepherds 
excludes profound or refined sentiment.' Rapin, in his 
De Carmine Pastorali, observes : ' 'Tis hard to give rules 
for that in which there have been none already given. 
Yet in this difficulty I will follow Aristotle's example, 
who, being to lay down rules concerning epics, proposed 
Homer as a pattern, from whom he deduced the whole 
art. So will I gather from Theocritus and Virgil, those 
fathers of pastoral, what I deliver on this account, their 
practice being rules in itself.' And Pope, in bis Discourse 
on Pastoral Poetry, says : ' Since the instructions given 
for any art are to be delivered as that art is in perfection, 
they must of necessity be derived from those in whom it 
is acknowledged so to be. It is therefore from the 
practice of Theocritus and Virgil (the only undisputed 
authors of pastoral) that the critics have drawn the fore- 
going notions concerning it.' And Boileau, in his Art 
Poetique, after cautioning writers of pastoral against the 
introduction of bombast splendour or pomp on the one 
hand, and the use of low and mean language on the 
other, making shepherds converse commc on parle au 
village, observes that ' the path between the two extremes 
is very difficult ' ; while Dryden, in his preface to Virgil's 
Pastorals, defines pastoral to be 'the imitation of a 
shepherd considered under that character.' Finally, 
to quote Dr. Johnson once more, he remarks, in his Lives 
of the Poets, ' truth and exactness of imitation, to show 



ALLAN RAMSAY 91 

the beauties without the grossness of country life, should 
be the aim of pastoral poetry.' 

By all these critics pastoral poetry is considered in its 
abstract or ideal form. They never dreamed of bidding 
poets descend to the concrete, or to actual rural life, as 
Beattie puts it, ' there to study that life as they found 
it.' Dr. Pennecuik justly remarks, in his essay on 
Ramsay and Pastoral Poetry : ' Of the ancient fanciful 
division of the ages of the world into the golden, silver, 
brazen, and iron, the first, introduced by Saturn into Italy, 
has been appropriated to the shepherd state. Virgil 
added this conceit to his polished plagiarisms from 
Theocritus ; and thus, as he advanced in elegance and 
majesty, receded from simplicity, nature, reality, and 
truth.' 

To Ramsay's credit be it ascribed, that he broke away 
from these rank absurdities and false ideas of pastoral 
poetry, and dared to paint nature and rural life as he 
found it. His principles are thus stated by himself: 
' The Scottish poet must paint his own country's scenes 
and his own country's life, if he would be true to his 
office. . . . The morning rises in the poet's description 
as she does in the Scottish horizon ; we are not carried 
to Greece and Italy for a shade, a stream, or a breeze ; 
the groves rise in our own valleys, the rivers flow from 
our own fountains, and the winds blow upon our own 
hills.' 

To the fact that Ramsay has painted Scotland and 
Scottish rustics as they are, and has not gone to the 
hermaphrodite and sexless inhabitants of a mythical 
Golden Age for the characters of his great drama, the 
heart of every Scot can bear testimony. Neither Burns, 



92 FAMOUS SCOTS 

supreme though his genius was over his predecessors, 
nor Scott, revelling as he did in patriotic sentiments as 
his dearest possession, can rival Ramsay in the absolute 
truth wherewith he has painted Scottish rustic life. He 
is at one and the same time the Teniers and the Claude 
of Scottish pastoral — the Teniers, in catching with subtle 
sympathetic insight the precise 'moments' and inci- 
dents in the life of his characters most suitable for repre- 
sentation j the Claude, for the almost photographic truth 
of his reproductions of Scottish scenery. 

That Ramsay was influenced by the spirit of his age 
cannot be denied, but he was sufficiently strong, both 
intellectually and imaginatively, to yield to that influence 
only so far as it was helpful to him in the inspiration of 
his great work, but to resist it when it would have 
imposed the fetters of an absurd mannerism upon the 
' machinery ' and the ' atmosphere ' of his pastoral. The 
last decades of the seventeenth, and the first two or 
three of the eighteenth centuries, were periods when 
pastoral poetry was in fashion. Italian and French 
literary modes were supreme. Modern pastoral may 
be said to have taken its rise in the Admetus of 
Boccaccio; in the introductory act of the Orfeo of 
Politian, written in 1475, an d termed Pastorale, and in 
the Arcadia of Jacopo Sanazzara. But, according to Dr. 
Burney, the first complete pastoral drama prepared for 
the stage was the Sacrificio Favola Pastorale of Agostino 
de Beccari, afterwards published in 1/ Pa mas so Italiano. 
They followed the Aminta of Tasso and the Filli di 
Sciro of Bonarelli in the beginning of the seventeenth 
century. In Italy and France, thereafter, pastoral 
became the literary mode for the time being ; to Clement 



ALLAN RAMSAY 93 

Marot, with his Complaint of Louise of Savoy, belonging 
the honour, as Professor Morley says, of producing the 
first French pastoral. It invaded all the fine arts, — music, 
painting, sculpture, romance, were all in turn conquered 
by it. From France it spread to England and to 
Scotland, and thereafter a flood of shepherds and 
shepherdesses, of Strephons and Chloes, of Damons, 
Phyllises, and Delias, spread over literature, of which the 
evidences in England are Spenser's Shepherds' Calendar, 
Sidney's Arcadia ; and in Scotland, Robert Henryson's 
Robene and Makyne. Nor did Milton disdain this form 
for his Lycidas j Pope also affected it, as well as Ambrose 
Philips ; while, under the title of The Shepherd's Week, 
Gay produced one of the most charming of his many 
charming works, in which our age, by consigning them 
to oblivion, has deliberately deprived itself of genuine 
poetic enjoyment. To the extent of the name, and of 
that only, was Ramsay influenced by his time. As 
regards all else he struck out a new line altogether. 

With regard to the locale where Ramsay laid the scene 
of the drama, two places have laid claim to it ; the first, 
and the least probable, being situate near Glencorse, 
about seven miles from Edinburgh ; the second, one and 
a half miles from the village of Carlops, about twelve 
miles distant from the metropolis, and five farther on 
from the first - mentioned spot. The balance of proba- 
bility lies strongly in favour of the Carlops 'scene.' In 
the first named, only the waterfall and one or two minor 
details can be identified as corresponding to the natural 
features of the scenery in the poem ; in the second, every 
feature named by Ramsay is full in view. Here are 
'the harbour - craig,' 'the trottin' burnie,' 'the little 



94 FAMOUS SCOTS 

linn' making 'a singin' din,' 'the twa birks,' 'the pool 
breast-deep,' ' the washing-green,' ' the loan,' ' Glaud's 
onstead,' ' Symon's house,' ' the craigy bield,' ' Hab- 
bie's Howe ' or house, and many others. Another 
strong point is that in Act ii. scene 2 of The Gentle 
Shepherd, Glaud threatens to set his biggest peat-stack 
on fire, through sheer joy over Sir William Worthy's 
prospective return. Around the Glencorse site for the 
action of the drama, there is not a peat to be dug in the 
whole parish; at the Carlops 'scene,' peat is the staple 
fuel of the district. Near by, also, is Newhall, the 
estate which in Ramsay's days was in possession of the 
Forbes family, who had purchased it from Dr. Pennecuik, 
the author of the Description of Tweeddak and other 
works. John Forbes of Newhall was one of Ramsay's 
dearest friends, and many relics of the poet are still 
preserved at the mansion house ; but it was with the 
Pennecuik family Ramsay associated his poem. In The 
Gentle Shepherd, Sir William Worthy is described as 
having had to fly into exile — 

' Our brave good master, wha sae wisely fled, 
And left a fair estate to save his head ; 
Because, ye ken fu' weel, he bravely chose 
To stand his liege's friend wi' great Montrose.' 

Newhall was purchased by Dr. Pennecuik's father two 
years before Charles I. was beheaded. The doctor 
himself was contemporary with Cromwell, Montrose, 
Monk, and Charles II., all of whom appear so distinctly 
in the pastoral as associated with the action of the piece. 
He had to go into hiding during the Commonwealth, for 
his support of Charles I., and for sheltering Montrose 
after the battle of Philiphaugh. Pennecuik the younger 



ALLAN RAMSAY 95 

(great-grandson of the doctor), in his Life of Ramsay, 
states that the poet appeared to have been indebted to 
Dr. Pennecuik for the Story of the Knight, but to have 
drawn the character from that of his friend Sir David 
Forbes. 

The issue of the successive editions of The Getiile 
Shepherd, though occupying a large share of his time not 
engrossed by the cares of business, did not altogether 
preclude him from writing some fresh pieces when 
occasion arose. In 1727 appeared a 'Masque,' which 
was performed at the celebration of the nuptials of 
James, Duke of Hamilton, and the Lady Ann Cochrane. 
In this form of poetry Ramsay revived a good old 
type very popular amongst the Elizabethan poets and 
dramatists, and even descending down to the days of 
Milton, whose Masque of Comus is the noblest specimen 
of this kind of composition in modern literature. 
Ramsay's dramatis perso?ice are rather a motley crew, 
but on the whole he succeeds in managing the dialogue 
of his gods, and goddesses very creditably, though any 
admirer of his genius can see it moves on stilts under 
such circumstances. The Pastoral Epithalamium upon 
the marriage of George Lord Ramsay and Lady Jean 
Maule is of a less ambitious cast, both as regards form 
and thought ; the consequence being, that the poet 
succeeds admirably in expressing the ideas proper to the 
occasion, when he was not bound by the fetters of an 
unfamiliar rhythm. 

v Ramsay's later poems had in turn attained, numerically 
speaking, to such bulk as fairly entitled him to consider 
the practicability of issuing a second quarto volume, 
containing all of value he had written between 1721 and 



96 FAMOUS SCOTS 

1728. From all quarters came requests for him so to 
do. Therefore, towards the close of 1728 he issued 
his second volume of collected poems. The interest 
awakened by The Gentle Shepherd still burned with a 
clear and steady glow. From this fact, gratifying, indeed, 
as regards the proximate success of the individual book, 
but prophetic also in an ultimate sense of the stability 
of reputation to be his lot in the republic of letters, he 
concluded, as he says in one of his letters to the Clerks 
of Penicuik, 'to regard himself as ane o' the national 
bards of Scotland.' That he was justified in doing so, 
the future amply testified. 

The realisation that he had now won for himself a 
permanent place in the literature of his land operated, 
however, rather injuriously upon the continued fecundity 
of his genius. He became timorous of further appeals 
to the public, lest he should injure his fame. Allan 
Ramsay, in his own eyes, became Ramsay's most dreaded 
rival. At length he deliberately adopted the resolution 
that the better part of valour was discretion, and that he 
would tempt fortune in verse no more. With the excep- 
tion of his poetical epistle to the Lords of Session, and 
his volume of metrical Fables, Ramsay's poetical career 
was completed. Henceforth he was occupied in prepar- 
ing the successive editions of his Works and of the Tea- 
Table Miscellany, and in compiling his collection of 
Scots Proverbs. 



CHAPTER VIII 

RESTING ON HIS LAURELS; BUILDS HIS THEATRE; 
HIS BOOK OF 'SCOTS PROVERBS' — 1730-40 

Ramsay had now reached the pinnacle of his fame. 
He was forty - four years of age, prosperous in 
business, enjoying a reputation not alone confined to 
Great Britain, but which had extended to France, to 
Holland, and to Italy. His great pastoral was lauded in 
terms the most gratifying by critics everywhere as the 
most perfect example of the pure idyll that had appeared 
since the days of Theocritus. The proudest of the 
nobility were not ashamed to take his arm for a walk 
down High Street, or to spend an hour cracking jokes 
and discussing literature with him under the sign of Ben 
Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden. 

What Chambers says in his Eminent Scotsmen, from 
which are culled the following facts, is strictly accurate : 
' Ramsay had now risen to wealth and high respect- 
ability, numbering among his familiar friends the best 
and the wisest men in the nation. By the greater part 
of the Scottish nobility he was caressed, and at the 
houses of some of the most distinguished of them, 
Hamilton Palace, Loudoun Castle, etc., was a frequent 
visitor.' With Duncan Forbes, Lord Advocate (and 
before many years to be Lord President), with Sir John 
7 



98 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Clerk of Penicuik, Sir William Bennet of Marlefield, Sir 
Alexander Dick of Prestonfield, near Edinburgh, he lived 
in the habit of daily, familiar, and friendly intercourse. 
With contemporary poets his relations were likewise 
of the most friendly kind. The two Hamiltons, of 
Bangour and Gilbertfield, were his constant associates. 
To Pope, to Gay, and to Somerville; to Meston, to 
Mitchell, and to Mallet, he addressed poetical greetings, 
and several of them returned the salutations in kind. 
From England, too, came another and a different proof 
of his popularity, in the fact that, when in 1726 Hogarth 
published his ' Illustrations of Hudibras ' in twelve 
plates, these were dedicated to ' William Ward of Great 
Houghton, Northamptonshire, and Allan Ramsay of 
Edinburgh.' Edinburgh itself was proud of her poet, 
and was not averse to manifesting the fact when fitting 
opportunity offered. He was a frequent visitor at the 
University, and Dugald Stewart relates that an old friend 
of his father informed him, the students of the fourth 
and fifth decades of last century used to point out a 
squat, dapper, keen- eyed little man, who was wont to 
walk up and down the space in front of their classrooms 
with Professors Drummond and Maclaurin, as ' the great 
poet, Allan Ramsay.' The narrator also added, he felt a 
secret disappointment when thus viewing for the first time 
a real live poet, and noting that he differed neither in 
dress nor mien from ordinary men. From his studies 
among the classics, and from the prints in the early 
editions of Horace and Virgil, he had been led to imagine 
the genus poet always perambulated the earth attired in 
flowing singing robes, their forehead bound with a chaplet, 
and carrying with them a substantial looking lyre ! 



ALLAN RAMSAY 99 

The year 1728 had witnessed, as we have seen, the 
publication of Allan Ramsay's last original work. 
Thereafter he was content to rest on his laurels, to 
revise new editions of his various poems, and to add to 
his Tea-Table Miscellany and Scots Songs. Perhaps he 
may have been conscious that the golden glow of 
youthful imagination at life's meridian, had already given 
place to those soberer tints that rise athwart the mental 
horizon, when the Rubicon of the forties has been 
crossed. In 1737, when writing to his friend Smibert, 
the painter (then in Boston, America, whither he had 
emigrated), Ramsay states, with reference to his relin- 
quishment of poetry : ' These six or seven years past I 
have not written a line of poetry ; I e'en gave over in 
good time, before the coolness of fancy that attends 
advanced years should make me risk the reputation I 
had acquired.' He then adds in the letter the following 
lines of poetry, from which we gather, further, that his 
determination was the result, not of mere impulse, pique, 
or chagrin, but of reasoned resolve — 

' Frae twenty-five to five-and-forty, 
My muse was neither sweer nor dorty ; 
My Pegasus would break his tether, 
E'en at the shaking of a feather, 
And through ideas scour like drift, 
Straking his wings up to the lift. 
Then, then my soul was in a low, 
That gart my numbers safely row ; 
But eild and judgment 'gin to say, 
Let be your sangs and learn to pray. ' 

By 1730, then, Ramsay's work, of an original kind at 
least, was over. In that year, however, he published 
another short volume of metrical fables, under the title, 



ioo FAMOUS SCOTS 

A Collection of Thirty Fables. Amongst them we find 
some of the most delightful of all our poet's work in this 
vein. Mercury in Quest of Peace, The Twa Lizards, 
The Caterpillar and the Ant, and The Twa Cats and the 
Cheese, possess, as Chalmers truly says, ' all the naivete of 
Phsedrus and La Fontaine, with the wit and ease of Gay.' 

And thus Ramsay's literary career closed, after well-nigh 
two decades of incessant intellectual activity. Begun, as 
Professor Masson says, ' in the last years of the reign of 
Queen Anne, and continued through the whole of the 
reign of George I., it had just touched the beginning of 
that of George II. when it suddenly ceased. Twice or 
thrice afterwards, at long intervals, he did scribble a 
copy of verses ; but in the main, from his forty-fifth year 
onwards, he rested on his laurels. Henceforward he 
contented himself with his bookselling, the management 
of his circulating library, and the superintendence of the 
numerous editions of his Collected Poems, his Gentle 
Shepherd, and his Tea-Table Miscellany? 

In pursuance of this determination, Ramsay, in 1731, 
at the request of a number of London booksellers, edited 
a complete edition of his works, wherein all the poems 
published in the quartos of 1721 and 1728 were 
included, in addition to The Gentle Shepherd. The 
success attending this venture was so great that, in 1733, 
a Dublin edition had to be prepared, which also hand- 
somely remunerated both author and publishers. From 
the American colonies, likewise, came accounts of the 
great popularity of Ramsay's poems, both among the 
inhabitants of the towns and the settlers in the mighty 
forests. Of the latter, many were Scotsmen, and to 
them the vividly realistic scenes and felicitous character- 



ALLAN RAMSAY 101 

drawing of The Gentle Shepherd touched, with a power 
and a pathos almost overwhelming, the subtlest fibres 
of that love for ' Caledonia, stern and wild,' which, 
deepened by distance as it is, and strengthened by 
absence, seems so inwoven with the very warp and woof 
of the nature of her children that, go where they will, it 
can never be eradicated, until the last great consumma- 
tion overtakes them, when earth returns to earth, ashes 
to ashes, and dust to dust. 

Our poet now had more time on his hands for those 
social duties and convivial pleasures wherein he took 
such delight. His new premises in the Luckenbooths, 
facing down towards, and therefore commanding a full 
view of, the magnificent thoroughfare of the High Street, 
were immediately opposite the ancient octagonal-shaped 
Cross of Edinburgh, where all official proclamations 
were made. The vicinity of the Cross was, on favourable 
afternoons, the fashionable rendezvous of the period. 
No sooner was the midday dinner over, than the fair 
ladies and gallants of the town — the former in the wide 
hoops, the jewelled stomachers, the silken capuchins 
(cloaks), the bongraces (hoods), and high head-dresses of 
the day; the latter in the long, embroidered coats, 
knee-breeches, silk stockings, and buckled shoes, tye- 
wigs, and three-cornered hats peculiar to the fourth 
decade of last century — issued from their dingy turnpike 
stairs in the equally darksome closes, pends, and wynds, 
to promenade or lounge, as best pleased them, in the 
open space around the Cross. Here were to be met all 
sorts and conditions of men and women. Viewed from 
the first storey of the building wherein Allan Ramsay's 
shop was situated, the scene must have been an exceed- 



102 FAMOUS SCOTS 

ingly animated one. Mr. Robert Chambers, with that 
graphic power of literary scene-painting he possessed in 
measure so rich, represented the picture, in his Tradi- 
tions of Edinburgh, in colours so vivid, and with a 
minuteness of detail so striking, that subsequent descrip- 
tions have been little more than reproductions of his. 
Let us take advantage of his admirable sketch of the 
scene round the Cross, filling in any important details 
he may have omitted. 

The jostlement and huddlement was extreme every- 
where. Ladies and gentlemen paraded along in the 
stately attire of the period : grave Lords of Session, and 
leading legal luminaries, bustling Writers to the Signet 
and their attendant clerks, were all there. Tradesmen 
chatted in groups, often bareheaded* at their shop doors ; 
caddies whisked about, bearing messages or attending to 
the affairs of strangers ; children darted about in noisy 
sport ; corduroyed carters from Gilmerton are bawling 
' coals ' and ' yellow sand ' ; fishwives are crying their 
1 caller haddies ' from Newhaven ; whimsicals and 
idiots going about, each with his or her crowd of tor- 
mentors ; tronmen with their bags of soot ; town-guards- 
men in rusty uniform, and with their ancient Lochaber 
axes ; water-carriers with their dripping barrels ; High- 
land drovers in philabeg, sporran, and cap ; Liddesdale 
farmers with their blue Lowland bonnets ; sedan chair- 
men, with here and there a red uniform from the 
castle — such was the scene upon which, in the early 
months of the year 1732, — alas ! his last on earth, — the 
celebrated London poet, John Gay, gazed from the 
windows of Allan Ramsay's shop. Beside him stood 
the redoubtable Allan himself, pointing out to him the 



ALLAN RAMSAY 103 

most notable personages in the motley crowd, and every 
now and then called upon to explain some Scotticism in 
his speech which reminded Gay of passages in The 
Gentle Shepherd that Pope had desired him to get 
explained from the author himself. And worthy Allan is 
flattered yet flustered withal with the honour, for beside 
them stand the famous Duchess of Queensberry — better 
known as Prior's 'Kitty,' otherwise Lady Catherine 
Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon— and her 
miser husband, who only opened his close fist to build 
such palatial piles as Queensberry House, in the Edin- 
burgh Canongate, and Drumlanrig Castle, Dumfries- 
shire. They have brought Gay up north with them, 
after his disappointment in getting his play — Polly, the 
continuation of the Beggars' Opera — refused sanction for 
representation by the Duke of Grafton, then Lord 
Chamberlain. Ah ! how honest Allan smirks and 
smiles, and becks and bows, with a backbone that will 
never be as supple in kotowing to anyone else. For 
does he not, like many more of us, dearly love a lord, 
and imagine the sun to rise and set in the mere enjoy- 
ment of the ducal smile ? 

A pleasant visit was that paid by Gay to Scotland in 
1732, before he returned to London to die, in the 
December of the same year. He spent many of his 
spare hours in the company of Ramsay ; and that of the 
two friends in whose society much of the latter's time was 
now to be passed — Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and Sir 
Alexander Dick of Prestonfield. By all three, Gay was 
deeply regretted, — by Clerk and Dick chiefly, because he 
had so much that was akin to their own genial friend, 
Allan Ramsay. 



104 FAMOUS SCOTS 

In 1736 our poet published a collection of Scols 
Proverbs, which, for some reason or another, has never 
been printed with his poems in those editions that are 
professedly complete. Only in Oliver's pocket edition 
is this excellent thesaurus of pithy and forcible Scottish 
apophthegms presented with his other works. That it 
is one of the best repertories of our proverbial current 
coin that exists, particularly with regard to the crystal- 
lised shrewdness and keen observation embodied in 
them, must be apparent to any reader, even the most 
cursory. To supersede the trashy works of Fergusson 
and Kelly was the reason why Ramsay set himself to 
gather up the wealth of aphoristic wisdom that lay 
manna-like on all sides of him. As might be expected, 
it is richest in the sayings common throughout the three 
Lothians, though the Lowlands, as a whole, are well 
represented. Of Gaelic proverbs there is scarce a trace, 
showing how faintly, despite his Jacobitism, his sym- 
pathies were aroused by Celtic tradition or Celtic poetry. 
Many of the sayings were undoubtedly coined in 
Ramsay's own literary mint, though the ideas may have 
been common property among the people of his day. 
But how close the union between the ideas and their 
expression in this collection ! Of looseness of phrase 
there is scarce a trace. How apt the stereotyping of 
current idioms in such pithy verbal nuggets as — ' Ne'er 
tell your fae when your foot sleeps,' ' Nature passes 
nurture,' ' Muckledom is nae virtue,' ' Happy the wife 
that's married to a motherless son,' ' Farmers' faugh 
gar lairds laugh.' 

Ramsay's dedication of his volume of Scots Proverbs 
to ' The Tenantry of Scotland, Farmers of the Dales and 



ALLAN RAMSAY 105 

Storemasters of the Hills,' shows the value he attached 
to this kind of literature. He writes in the colloquial 
Scots, and his words are valuable as presenting us with 
a reliable example of the Scots vernacular as spoken in 
educated circles early last century. ' The following 
hoard of Wise Sayings and observations of our fore- 
fathers,' he remarks, ' which have been gathering through 
many bygone ages, I have collected with great care, and 
restored to their proper sense, which had been frequently 
tint [lost] by publishers that did not understand our 
landwart [inland] language. ... As naething helps our 
happiness mair than to hae the mind made up with right 
principles, I desire you, for the thriving and pleasure of 
you and yours, to use your een and lend your lugs to 
these guid auld says, that shine wi' wailed sense and will 
as lang as the warld wags. Gar your bairns get them by 
heart ; let them hae a place among your family-books ; 
and may never a window -sole through the country be 
without them. On a spare hour, when the day is clear, 
behind a rick, or on the green howm, draw the treasure 
frae your pooch and enjoy the pleasant companion. Ye 
happy herds, while your hirdsels are feeding on the 
flowery braes, ye may eithly mak yoursels masters of the 
holy ware.' 

Hitherto the sky of Ramsay's life had been well-nigh 
cloudless. Misfortune and failure had never shrivelled 
his hopes or his enterprises with the frost of disappoint- 
ment. Nothing more serious than an envious scribbler's 
splenetic effusions had ever assailed him. Now he was 
to know the sting of mortification and the pinch of 
financial loss. 

We have already adverted to the gloomy bigotry of a 



106 FAMOUS SCOTS 

certain section of the Scottish clergy of this period. To 
them everything that savoured of jollity and amusement 
was specially inspired by the Evil One, for the hindrance 
of their ministerial labours. The references to this matter 
are manifold throughout Ramsay's poetry. Though no 
one had a deeper respect for vital piety than he, no one 
more bitterly reprobated that puritanic fanaticism that 
saw sin and wrong -doing in innocent recreation and 
relaxation. Against Ramsay the ecclesiastical thunder 
had commenced to roll some years before (according to 
Wodrow), when he started his circulating library. That 
the works of Shakespeare, Beaumout and Fletcher, Ben 
Jonson, Massinger, Dryden, Waller, and the romances of 
chivalry, should be placed in the hands of the youth of 
Edinburgh, was accounted a sin so grave as to merit 
Presbyterial censure. Accordingly, a party, amongst 
whom was the infamous Lord Grange, attempted to 
suppress the library. But the cegis of the redoubtable 
Dr. Webster had been thrown over him, and the pother 
in time died away. It appears, however, that Ramsay, in 
1736, had imported a large stock of translations of the 
most celebrated French plays of the day, and had added 
them to his library. Sufficient was this to blow into 
a blaze the smouldering embers of clerical indignation. 
From pulpit and press our poet was fulminated at. Not 
that he gave the smallest sign that he cared one jot for 
all their denunciations. He attended to his shop and 
his library, and quaffed his claret at the Isle of Man Arms, 
at Luckie Dunbar's in Forrester's Wynd, or at the famous 
John's Coffee House, with the cynical response that ' they 
might e'en gang their ain gate.' 

But just at this precise time Ramsay conceived the 



ALLAN RAMSAY 107 

idea of becoming a theatre-proprietor, and thus benefit- 
ing the worthy burgesses of Auld Reekie by erecting a 
house where standard dramas might be performed. The 
very proposal raised a storm of indignation in clerical 
circles, against which even Dr. Webster and his friends 
were powerless. Hitherto the opposition of the Presby- 
terian ministers had prevented the erection of any theatre 
in the town. The companies of itinerating players who 
might chance to visit the town from time to time, were 
compelled to hire a hall or a booth for their perform- 
ances. Prior to the Commonwealth, histrionic exhibitions 
were frequent in Edinburgh. But from 1650 to the 
Union, fanaticism became paramount and sternly re- 
pressed them. One of the earliest mentions of dramatic 
representations after that date occurs in 17 10, and again 
in 1 7 15, when a regular company of players performed 
certain dramas in the Long Gallery and in the Tennis 
Court at Holyrood-house. In the subsequent winter, as 
we learn from the Scots Courantoi December 16, 17 15, 
the plays were represented in the old magazine-house at 
the back of the foot of the Canongate, on which occasion, 
said the notice, ' the several parts would be performed 
by some new actors just arrived from England.' 

On the last night of the year 17 19 Ramsay supplied 
a prologue for the performance of Ot way's play, 'The 
Orphan,' and ' The Cheats ' of Scapin, ' by some young 
gentlemen,' wherein he remarked — 

• Somebody says to some folk, we're to blame ; 
That 'tis a scandal and a burning shame 
To thole young callants thus to grow sae snack, 
And learn — O mighty crimes !— to speak and act ! 
But let them talk. In spite of ilk endeavour, 
We'll cherish wit, and scorn their fead or favour. 



io8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

In 1722 he wrote an epilogue, to be spoken after the 
acting of 'The Drummer'; in 1726 a prologue, to be 
addressed to the audience by the famous Tony Aston on 
the first night of his appearance; in 1727 a prologue, to 
be delivered before the acting of 'Aurenzebe,' at 
Haddington School; and finally, an epilogue, recited 
after the performance of 'The Orphan' and 'The 
Gentle Shepherd,' in January 1729. All these, and 
probably others that have not been preserved, evince that 
Ramsay cherished a warm affection for the drama, with 
an earnest desire to see his fellow-countrymen profit by 
it. After the indignant remonstrance — 

' Shall London have its houses twa, 
And we be doomed to nane ava ? 
Is our metropolis ance the place 
Where lang-syne dwelt the royal race 
Of Fergus, this gait dwindled doun 
To the level o' a clachan toun ? 
While thus she suffers the desertion 
Of a maist rational diversion,' 

he commenced to erect, in 1736, a playhouse in 
Carrubber's Close. In his advertisement in the Cale- 
donian Mercury, announcing the prospective opening, he 
states, he had built the house ' at vast expense,' in order 
that, during the winter nights, the citizens might enjoy 
themselves in hearing, performed by competent actors, 
dramas that would amuse, instruct, and elevate. 

His advertisement, in the issue of the Mercury for 
September 15, 1736, reads: — 

' The new theatre in Carrubber's Close being in great forward- 
ness, will be opened on the 1st of November. These are to 
advertise the ladies and gentlemen who incline to purchase annual 
tickets, to enter their names before the 20th of October next, on 



ALLAN RAMSAY 109 

which day they shall receive their tickets from Allan Ramsay, on 
paying 30s. , no more than forty to be subscribed for ; after which 
none will be disposed of under two guineas.' 

Meantime the clerical party and the enemies of 
Ramsay had joined hands in common opposition to his 
plans. ' Hardly had he begun operations ' (writes 
Professor Masson) ' when there came the extraordinary 
statute of 10 Geo. II. (1737), regulating theatres for the 
future all over Great Britain. As by this statute, there 
could be no performance of stage plays out of London 
and Westminster, save when the king chanced to be 
residing in some other town, Ramsay's speculation 
collapsed.' In fact, the municipal authorities, at the 
instigation of the clergy, employed the force of the 
statute peremptorily to close his theatre. In vain he 
appealed to law. ' He only received a quibble for his 
pains. He was injured without being damaged,' said 
the lawyers. In vain he appealed in a poetical epistle, to 
President Duncan Forbes of the Court of Session, wherein 
he says — 

' Is there aught better than the stage 
To mend the follies o' the age, 
If managed as it ought to be, 
Frae ilka vice and blaidry free ? 
Wherefore, my Lords, I humbly pray 
Our lads may be allowed to play, 
At least till new-house debts be paid off, 
The cause that I'm the maist afraid of; 
Which lade lyes on my single back, 
And I maun pay it ilka plack.' 

Well might the good-hearted, honourable-minded poet 
dread the future. The responsibility lay upon him alone 
for the expense of the building, and from many intima- 



no FAMOUS SCOTS 

tions he let drop the failure of the speculation well-nigh 
ruined him. But the increasing sale of his books, and 
the expanding prosperity of his business, soon recouped 
his outlay. That he was much depressed by his losses, 
heavy and unexpected as they were, is evident from a 
private letter he wrote at this time to the President, and 
which is still preserved at Culloden House. ' Will you,' 
he writes, ' give me something to do ? Here I pass a 
sort of half-idle, scrimp life, tending a trifling trade that 
scarce affords me the needful. Had I not got a parcel 
of guineas from you, and such as you, who were pleased 
to patronise my subscriptions, I should not have had a 
gray groat. I think shame — but why should I, when I 
open my mind to one of your goodness ? — to hint that I 
want to have some small commission, when it happens 
to fall in your way to put me into it.' 

Not without an element of pathos is the scene that is 
here presented, of him, who had done so much to amuse 
and elevate his fellows, being compelled to make such a 
request. Satisfactory is it, however, to know that, though 
the poetical epistle 'to the Lords' was fruitless of 
practical benefit in the way he desired, albeit exciting 
for him the warmest sympathy among the worthy 
senators of the College of Justice, there is reason to 
believe the President was able to throw ' some small 
commission ' in Ramsay's way, and thus, by his opportune 
generosity, to dispel the thunderclouds of misfortune 
hurrying hard upon the poet's steps. 

Of course, to his enemies (amongst whom was Penne- 
cuik, the poet), as well as to the more bigoted of the 
clergy, his trials were a judgment upon his conduct. A 
shoal of pamphlets and pasquinades appeared, as though 



ALLAN RAMSAY in 

to rub salt into the raw wounds of his mortified feelings : 
such despicable effusions — written in more than one case 
by ' ministers of the Gospel ' — as ' The Flight of Religious 
Piety from Scotland, upon account of Ramsay's lewd 
books and the Hell-bred comedians, who debauch all 
the Faculties of the Soul of our Rising Generation,' ' A 
Looking-Glass for Allan Ramsay,' ' The Dying Words 
of Allan Ramsay,' etc. As Chalmers remarks : ' The 
lampooners left intimations of what must have been of 
considerable consolation to our adventurous dramatist ; 
that " he had acquired wealth " ; that " he possessed a 
fine house " ; that " he had raised his kin to high degree." ' 
Such topics of censure did more honour than hurt to 
Ramsay. To their ribald raillery the poet replied only 
by a contemptuous silence, infinitely more galling than if 
he had turned on the wasps and crushed them, thus be- 
speaking for them a prominence in no measure merited. 
Their spleen he forgot amid the engrossments of a closer 
attention to business, and the charms of friendship's 
intercourse. 

It may be added, however, that the whirligig of time 
brought in for Ramsay his revenges upon his enemies. 
The theatre which in 1746 was erected in Playhouse 
Close in the Canongate, though only by a quibbling 
evasion of the statute, so Draconic were its provisions, 
was largely due to his energy and exertions. Thus, says 
a biographer, Ramsay, at the age of sixty, had the 
satisfaction to see dramatical entertainments enjoyed 
by the citizens, whose theatrical tastes he had kindled 
and fostered. 



CHAPTER IX 

CLOSING YEARS OF LIFE; HIS HOUSE ON CASTLEHILL ; 
HIS FAMILY; HIS PORTRAITS 1740-58. 

Little more of a biographical character is there 
to relate. The last seventeen years of Ramsay's life 
were passed in the bosom of his family, and in attention 
to his business. His son, Allan — afterwards an artist 
of great celebrity, and portait painter to George III., — 
after studying, as the proud father informs his friend 
Smibert in a letter about this time, with Mr. Hyffidg in 
London, and spending a little time at home 'painting 
like a Raphael,' had been sent to Rome, where he made 
good use of his opportunities. The father's heart yearns 
over the boy, and he pathetically adds : ' I'm sweer to 
part with him, but canna stem the current which flows 
from the advice of his patrons and his own inclination.' 
His three daughters were growing up into ' fine, 
handsome girls,' while ' my dear auld wife is still my 
bedfellow.' 

What a beautiful picture we get of the kindly old 
poet, drawn unconsciously by himself in this letter. 
Domesticity and parental affection were two qualities 
pre-eminently present in Ramsay's nature. 

From Mrs. Murray of Henderland we also receive a 
delicious side-peep into Allan's character. In 1825 she 



ALLAN RAMSAY n 3 

informed Mr. Robert Chambers that ' he was one of the 
most amiable men she had ever known. His constant 
cheerfulness and lively conversational powers had made 
him a favourite amongst persons of rank, whose guest 
he frequently was. Being very fond of children, he 
encouraged his daughters in bringing troops of young 
ladies about the house, in whose sports he would mix 
with a patience and vivacity wonderful in an old man. 
He used to give these young friends a kind of ball once 
a year. From pure kindness for the young, he would 
help to make dolls for them, and cradles wherein to 
place these little effigies, with his own hands.' 

From 1740 to 1743 he enjoyed to the full the idyllic 
happiness and peace described in his epistle to James 
Clerk of Penicuik — 

' Though born to not ae inch of ground, 
I keep my conscience white and sound ; 
And though I ne'er was a rich heaper, 
To make that up I live the cheaper ; 
By this ae knack I've made a shift 
To drive ambitious care adrift ; 
And now in years and sense grown auld, 
In ease I like my limbs to fauld. 
Debts I abhor, and plan to be 
Frae shochling trade and danger free, 
That I may, loos'd frae care and strife, 
With calmness view the edge of life ; 
And when a full ripe age shall crave, 
Slide easily into my grave.' 

In 1742, finding himself in a position to take more 
ease than his busy life had hitherto permitted to him, he 
bought a piece of ground on the Castlehill, overlooking 
the valley of the North Loch, and there erected that 
curious house, with its octagonal-shaped frontage, copied 



1 1 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 

from a Neapolitan villa, and designed by his son Allan, 
which so long was an ornament on the northern slope 
overlooking the New Town of Edinburgh. From his 
windows a reach of scenery was commanded, probably 
not surpassed in Europe, stretching from the mouth of 
the Firth of Forth on the east to the Grampians on the 
west, and extending far across the green hills of Fife to 
the north. The poet, however, becoming alarmed at the 
expense he was incurring, altered his son's design after 
the building was half completed. In consequence, the 
mansion presented a very quaint appearance. Tradition 
states that Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (afterwards Lord 
Milton) first detected the resemblance to a goose-pie. 
Be this as it may, Allan was grievously vexed by the 
comparison, and one day, when showing it, in the pride of 
his heart, to the witty Lord Elibank, who duly admired its 
unrivalled prospect, he added, ' And yet, my lord, thae 
toon wits say it's like naething else than a guse-pie.' 'Deed, 
Allan, noo I see ye intilt, I'm thinkin' the wits are no' sae 
far wrang.' History does not record Allan's rejoinder. 

Scarcely had he entered his new mansion, however, 
expecting to enjoy there many years of domestic happi- 
ness and peace, than the great sorrow of his life fell 
upon him. In March 1743, his faithful and loving 
partner, who had stood by him amid all the storm and 
stress of his busy career, was taken from him, after thirty 
years of unbroken affection and devotion. She was 
interred in the Greyfriars Churchyard, as the cemetery 
records show, on the 28th of March 1743. So intense 
was her husband's grief that he, who for many another 
had written elegies instinct with deep sympathy and 
regret, could not trust himself to write of her, 'lest I 



ALLAN RAMSAY 115 

should break doon a'thegither into my second bairn- 
hood.' Alas ! poor Allan ! 

But his daughters, realising to the full the part that 
now devolved on them, stepped into the gap left in his 
domestic circle. Nobly they fulfilled their duty, and 
amongst the most affecting tributes Ramsay paid, is that 
to the filial affection of 'his girls,' over whom, after their 
mother had gone from them, he watched with a wealth 
of paternal love and an anxious solicitude, as unsparing 
as it was unremitting. 

And thus did the life of Allan Ramsay roll quietly 
onward through placid reaches of domestic and social 
happiness, during the closing fourteen years of existence. 
Though he did not formally retire from business until 
1755, he left it almost entirely in the hands of capable 
subordinates. He had worked hard in his day, and now, 
as he said — 

' I the best and fairest please, 

A little man that lo'es my ease, 
And never thole these passions lang 
That rudely mint to do me wrang. ' 

Accordingly, he lived quietly in the 'goose-pie,' 'fauld- 
ing his limbs in ease,' and absolutely refusing to concern 
himself with anything political, social, or ecclesiastical 
calculated to bring worry and trouble upon him. 

During the Rebellion of 1745, tradition states that 
Prince Charles Edward, after the capture of the city by 
the Highland army, sent a message to Ramsay, asking 
him to repair to Holyrood, that some mark of his new 
sovereign's favour might be bestowed on him. Singular, 
indeed, it was, that the poet should have selected the day 
in question to repair to his friend James Clerk's mansion 



n6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

at Penicuik, and that he should there have been seized 
with so severe an indisposition as to prevent him return- 
ing to Edinburgh for nearly five weeks. Though a Tory 
and a Jacobite, honest Allan knew upon which side his 
bread was buttered. Such honours as would have been 
conferred would have been inconvenient. Moreover, the 
Rebellion had not yet attained dimensions sufficient to 
transmute it from a rebellion into a revolution. Pawki- 
ness and caution were prominent traits in his character, 
and they were never used to more salient advantage than 
in the instance in question. 

To the end of life, Ramsay remained the same kindly, 
genial, honourable man, whose appearance in any of the 
social circles he frequented, was the signal for ' quips and 
cranks and wreathed smiles ' to go round, and for the 
feast of reason and the flow of soul to commence. His 
squat, podgy figure waddling down the High Street on 
his way to his shop in the Luckenbooths, his head 
covered with the quaint three-cornered hat of the period, 
beneath which peeped his tie-wig, was one of the familiar 
sights of Edinburgh, to be pointed out to strangers with 
a pride and an affection that never diminished. In his 
little villa on the Castlehill he entertained his friends 
in true Horatian style, and with a hospitality every whit 
as warm, though it was every whit as simple as that 
which the great Roman promised Maecenas, he made 
them free of what was in his power to give. 

Foibles he had, — and who is without them ? faults, too, 
— for what character lacks them ? yet his very foibles and 
his faults leaned to virtue's side. Vain he certainly was, 
deny the fact who can? his egotism, also, may have 
jarred on some whose individuality was as strong as his 



ALLAN RAMSAY 117 

own, but whose liberality in making allowances for human 
weaknesses was less. Nay, he may even in some respects 
have been 'near' with regard to certain little things, 
though this was the result of his humble upbringing, 
where, in the household economy of the Crichtons, a 
pound was a fortune. But once break through the crust 
of his old-fashioned formalism with the thrust of some 
pressing appeal for aid, and instantly we touch the core 
of a ready and warm sympathy — a sympathy as catholic 
in the radius of its beneficence as it was munificent in 
the measure of its benefactions. To the poor, to the 
suffering, to the widow and the orphan, to the fatherless 
and the friendless, Allan Ramsay was ever the readiest 
to help where help was really needed ; and if his vanity 
liked the fact to be made public property, wherein lay 
the harm? Do our published subscription-lists to-day 
not testify to the existence of the same foible in nine- 
tenths of us ? To the improvident, however, to the 
lazy, to the genteel beggar, and to the thousand and one 
forms mendicity — supported by mendacity — takes to 
extort money, Allan was as adamant. ' Gang your wa's,' 
he would say to such ; ' gar your elbuck earn what your 
mooth eats, and ye'll be a better man.' 

Allan has had the misfortune to be rated by what he 
did not do in the way of charity, rather than by what he 
did. Because he esteemed charity to begin at home, 
and that he should provide for his own before partici- 
pating in any schemes for providing for others, he 
has been rated as selfish and miserly. The opposite 
is the case. Prudent, careful, and economical, — into no 
speculation would he go from which he did not see the 
probability, at least, of an adequate return. Hence, 



n8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

during the South Sea madness, he kept his head when 
many a better man went mad with the speculative mania. 
He was pious, without his piety being black-edged with 
that gloomy bigotry which characterised much of the 
Presbyterianism of the seventeeenth and eighteenth 
centuries in Scotland. As he put the matter himself in 
his Epistle to James Arbuckle : 

'Neist, Anti-Toland, Blunt, and Whiston, 
Know positively I'm a Christian, 
Believing truths and thinking free, 
Wishing thrawn parties would agree.' 

He delighted in sociality and conviviality, but recoiled 
from aught savouring of licence or excess. To coarse- 
ness, it is true, he may at times have stooped in his 
work j but we must remember the spirit of the times 
was in favour of calling a spade a spade, and not 'an 
implement for disintegrating planetary particles.' To 
no degree greater than did Swift, or Steele, or Arbuthnot, 
or Gay, can Allan Ramsay be considered to have 
smirched his pages with references either ribald or 
indelicate. The spirit of the age was in fault when 
coarseness was rated as wit ; and to be true to life, the 
painters of the manners around them had to represent 
these as they were, not as they would have liked them 
to be. 

On the 9th May 1 755 Ramsay, when writing to his friend, 
James Clerk of Penicuik, a rhyming epistle, had said — 

' Now seventy years are o'er my head, 
And thirty mae may lay me dead.' 

Alas ! the ' Shadow feared of man ' was already sitting 
waiting for him at no great distance farther on in his 
life's journey. For some years he had suffered acutely 



ALLAN RAMSAY 119 

from scurvy in the gums, which in the end attacked 
his jawbone and affected his speech. To the close, how- 
ever, he retained his cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirits. 
When the last great summons at length came to him, he 
met it with a manly fortitude and Christian resignation. 

Amongst his last words, according to his daughter 
Janet, who survived until 1807, were these: 'I'm no' 
feared of death ; the Bricht and Morning Star has risen 
and is shining mair and mair unto the perfect day.' 
And so he passed ' into the unseen ' on the 7th January 
1758, in the seventy-second year of his age. He was 
interred two days after in the Greyfriars Churchyard, 
where his gravestone is still visible, bearing the inscrip- 
tion : ' In this cemetery was interred the mortal part 
of an immortal poet, Allan Ramsay, author of The Gentle 
Shepherd and other admirable poems in the Scottish 
dialect. He was born in 1686 and died in 1758. 

' No sculptured marble here, no pompous lay, 
No storied urn, no animated bust ; 
This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way 
To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust. 1 

Though here you're buried, worthy Allan, 
We'll ne'er forget you, canty callan ; 
For while your soul lives in the sky, 
Your "Gentle Shepherd" ne'er shall die.' 

Sir John Clerk, one of the Barons of the Exchequer 
in Scotland, who admired his genius and was one of his 
most intimate friends, erected at his family seat at 
Penicuik an obelisk to his memory ; while Mr. Alexander 

1 The first stanza is in reality by Burns, and is identical with 
that he placed on the tombstone he erected over the remains of 
Fergusson, the poet, in the Canongate Churchyard. 



120 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Fraser-Tytler, at Woodhouselee, near the Glencorse 
locale of The Gentle Shepherd, has erected a rustic temple 
which bears the inscription — 

'Allano Ramsay et Genio Loci. 

' Here midst those streams that taught thy Doric Muse 
Her sweetest song, — the hills, the woods, and stream, 
Where beauteous Peggy strayed, list'ning the while 
Her Gentle Shepherd's tender tale of love. 
Scenes which thy pencil, true to Nature, gave 
To live for ever. Sacred be this shrine ; 
And unprofaned, by ruder hands, the stone 
That owes its honours to thy deathless name.' 

Ramsay was survived by his son Allan, the painter, 
and by his two daughters, Christian and Janet, who 
amongst them inherited the poet's fortune. The house 
on the Castlehill fell to his son, and remained in the 
possession of the family, as Mr. Logie Robertson records, 
until 1845, when it changed hands at the death of 
General John Ramsay, the poet's grandson, and the last 
of his line. For many years it stood, an object of 
interest to all admirers of the bard, until 1892, when, 
just as the building was beginning to show signs of age, 
the site was bought for the erection of the new students' 
boarding-house, ' University Hall,' which so imposingly 
crowns the ridge of the Castlehill. With a reverence 
for the memory of the poet as rare as it is commendable, 
the promoters of the scheme resolved to preserve as 
much as possible of the house, and the greater part of 
it has been incorporated in the new building. 

Of Ramsay we have only two portraits remaining that 
are of any real value, — that painted by his son Allan, and 
that by Smibert, the poet's lifelong friend. The latter 



ALLAN RAMSAY 121 

represents him in youth, the former in age — both being 
considered, at the time of execution, striking likenesses. 
But perhaps the best idea of the appearance of the poet 
may be gathered from Sir John Steele's fine statue of 
him (designed from his son's portrait) which now stands 
at the corner of West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, 
immediately below the site of his house. There, with 
his familiar 'nightcap ' on his head, he stands, watching 
the busy crowds passing to and fro in front of him, 
wearing the while an expression on his face as though 
he were saying with his Patie — 

' He that hath just enough can soundly sleep, 
The o'ercome only fashes fouk to keep ; 
Content's the greatest bliss we can procure 
Frae 'boon the lift : without it, kings are poor.' 



CHAPTER X 

RAMSAY AS A PASTORAL POET AND AN ELEGIST 

In attempting a critical estimate of the value of 
Ramsay's works, for the purpose of analysis it will be 
most convenient to consider the great body of his 
writings under certain classified headings — (i) Ramsay 
as a Pastoral Poet and an Elegist ; (2) Ramsay as a 
Satirist and a Song-writer ; (3) Ramsay's Miscellaneous 
Works. 

In the chapter on The Gentle Shepherd, we noted the 
distinctive constituents of pastoral poetry, as currently 
defined, and also wherein Ramsay's principles, as ex- 
emplified in practice, differ from those of other writers 
of pastoral. To furnish examples illustrative of our 
contention is now all that remains to be done. Early 
in his poetical career, as soon, in fact, as he had 
completed his first tentative efforts, Ramsay seems to 
have become conscious, with that rare gift of prevision 
always distinguishing him, that his strength lay in a 
picturesque yet truthful delineation of rural life. His 
earliest pieces, although termed elegies, exhibit, rather, 
many of the characteristics of pastorals, in the broad 
humour and in the graphic and vivid colouring where- 
with he depicts the scenes at Maggy Johnston's tavern 
at Morningside, or the incidents in the life of Luckie 



ALLAN RAMSAY 123 

Wood or of Patie Birnie. But, as he has termed them 
elegies, under that heading let them be considered, 
though a humorous or mock elegy is somewhat of a 
contradiction in terms. 

Roughly classified, Ramsay's pastorals may be stated 
as follows : — the dialogues between Ricky (Sir Rich. 
Steele) and Sandy (Alex. Pope), on the death of Mr. 
Addison ; between Robert, Richy, and Sandy, on the 
death of Matthew Prior ; Keitha, on the death of the 
Countess of Wigton ; an Ode with a Pastoral Recitative, 
on the marriage of James Earl of Wemyss to Miss Janet 
Charteris ; A Masque, performed at the celebration of 
the nuptials of James Duke of Hamilton and Lady Ann 
Cochrane ; A Pastoral Epithalamium, on the marriage 
of George Lord Ramsay and Lady Jean Maule ; Betty 
and Kate, a pastoral farewell to Mr. Aikman ; and finally, 
The Gentle Shepherd. 

Of Ramsay's less important pastorals, the distinguish- 
ing characteristics are their simplicity, their tenderness, 
and their freedom from aught didactic. In conforming 
to the conventional idea of pastoral, — the idea, that is, 
of the shepherd state being a condition of perfect peace 
and Arcadian felicity and propriety, — in place of copying 
direct from nature, they one and all differ from The 
Gentle Shepherd. The picture of burly Sir Richard 
Steele and of crooked little Alexander Pope, clad in 
shepherd's weeds, and masquerading with dogs and 
pipes and what not, savours somewhat of the ludicrous. 
Then, in Richy and Sandy, he makes Pope bewail the 
death of Addison, with whom he had been on anything 
but friendly terms for years previous ; while the following 
picture of the deceased grave-visaged Secretary of State, 



i2 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 

in such a position as described in the following lines, 
tends to induce us profane Philistines of these latter 
days, to smile, if not to sneer — 

' A better lad ne'er leaned out o'er a kent, 
Nor hounded collie o'er the mossy bent : 
Blythe at the bughts how oft hae we three been, 
Heaitsome on hills, and gay upon the green.' 

This, however, was the fashion in vogue, and to it our 
poet had to conform. In Richy and Sandy, in Robert, 
Ricky, and Sandy, and in his earlier pastorals generally, 
we seem to see the poet struggling to rid himself of the 
conventional prejudices against painting rural nature 
in the real, and in favour of 'a golden -age rusticity' 
purely imaginary. Not by this is it implied that I claim 
for our poet the credit of first insisting on reverting to 
nature for the study of scenes and character. The same 
conviction, according to Lowell, was entertained by 
Spenser, and his Shepherds' Calendar was a manifestation, 
however imperfect and unsatisfactory, of his desire to 
hark back to nature for inspiration. In Keitha the 
same incongruity, as noted above, is visible. The poem 
in question, with that on the Marriage of the Earl of 
Wemyss, can neither be ranked as conventional pastoral 
nor as pure pastoral, according to Ramsay's later style. 
We note the \ Colins ' and ' Ringans,' the ' shepherd's 
reeds ' and ' shepherd's weeds,' and the picture of 

' the singing shepherd on the green 

Armyas hight, wha used wi' tunefu' lay 
To please the ear when he began to play,' 

— an imitation of Milton's immortal lines in Comus, 
which are too well known to need quotation. All of a 
piece this with the 'golden-age pastoral.' In the same 



ALLAN RAMSAY 125 

poems, however, occur intimations that the incongruity 
was perceived by the author, but that, as yet, he did not 
see any means of remedying the uniform monotony 
of the conventional form. The leaven was at work 
in Ramsay's mind, but so far it only succeeded in 
influencing but the smallest moiety of the lump. 

In the Masque, written in celebration of the marriage 
of the Duke of Hamilton, the sentiments expressed are 
wholly different. Written subsequently to The Gentle 
Shepherd, Ramsay exhibited in it his increased technical 
deftness, and how much he had profitted by the experi- 
ence gained in producing his great pastoral. The 
Masque, albeit professedly a dramatic pastoral, entirely 
abjures the lackadaisical shepherds and shepherdesses of 
conventional pastoral, and, as a poem of pure imagination, 
reverts to the ancient mythology for the dramatis persona. 

All these pieces, however, though they exhibit a facility 
in composition, a fecundity of imagination, a skilful 
adaptation of theme to specific metrical form, a rare 
human sympathy, and a depth of pathos as natural in 
expression as it was genuine in its essence, are only, so 
to speak, the preludes to The Gentle Shepherd. In the 
latter, Ramsay's matured principles of pastoral composi- 
tion are to be viewed where best their relative importance 
can be estimated, namely, when put into practice. 

By competent critics, The Gentle Shepherd is generally 
conceded to be the noblest pastoral in the English 
language. Dr. Hugh Blair, in his lectures on Rhetoric 
and Belles Lettres, styled it ' a pastoral drama which will 
bear being brought into comparison with any composition 
of this kind in any language. ... It is full of so much 
natural description and tender sentiment as would do 



126 FAMOUS SCOTS 

honour to any poet. The characters are well drawn, the 
incidents affecting, the scenery and manners lively and 
just.' And one of Dr. Blair's successors in the Chair of 
Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of 
Edinburgh, — a man and a Scotsman who, in his day, has 
done more than any other to foster amongst our youth 
a love of all that is great and good and beautiful in our 
literature ; a teacher, too, whose students, whom he has 
imbued with his own noble spirit, are scattered over the 
world, from China to Peru, — Emeritus-Professor David 
Masson, has observed in his charming Edinburgh Sketches : 
'The poem was received with enthusiastic admiration. 
There had been nothing like it before in Scottish 
literature, or in any other : nothing so good of any kind 
that could be voted even similar; and this was at once 
the critical verdict.' 

To anyone who will carefully compare the Idylls of 
Theocritus, the Eclogues of Virgil, and the Aminta of 
Tasso, with Ramsay's great poem, the conviction will be 
driven home, — in the face, it may be, of many deeply- 
rooted prejudices, — that the same inspiration which, like 
a fiery rivulet, runs through the three former master- 
pieces, is present also in the latter — that inspiration 
being the perfect and unbroken homogeneity existing 
between the local atmosphere of the poem and the 
characteristics of the dramatis persona. This fact it is 
which renders the Aminta so imperishable a memorial of 
Tasso's genus ; for it is Italian pastoral, redolent of the 
air, and smacking of the very soil of sunny Italy. The 
symmetrical perfection of The Gentle Shepherd, in like 
manner, is due to the fact that the feelings and desires 
and impulses of the characters in the pastoral are those 



ALLAN RAMSAY 127 

distinctively native and proper to persons in their sphere 
of life. There is no dissidence visible between what 
may imperfectly be termed the motif of the poem and 
the sentiments of even the most subordinate characters 
in it. Therein lies the true essence of literary symmetry 
— the symmetry not alone of mere form, though that also 
was present, but the symmetry resulting from the 
harmony of thought with its expression, of scene and its 
characters, of situation and its incidents. Such the 
symmetry exhibited by Homer's Iliad, by Dante's 
Inferno, by Milton's Paradise Lost, by Cervantes' Don 
Quixote, by Camoens' Lusiad, by Scott's Lay of the Last 
Minstrel, by Tennyson's Idylls. 

Frankly, it must be admitted that only in his Gentle 
Shepherd does Ramsay attain this outstanding ex- 
cellence. His other pieces are meritorious, — highly so ; 
but they could have been produced by many a writer of 
the age with equal, perhaps superior, felicity, and they 
shine only in the reflected light of The Gentle Shepherd '; 
even as Scott's Lord of the Isles and Harold the 
Dauntless were saved from being 'damned as 
mediocrity ' only by the excellence of the Lay of the 
Last Minstrel and Marmion. 

The great charm of The Gentle Shepherd lies in the 
skilfully - balanced antithesis of its contrasts, in the 
reflected interest each type casts on its opposite. As 
in Moliere's Tartuffe, it is the vivid contrast created 
between the hypocrisy of the title-character and the easy 
good-nature of Orgon, that begets a reciprocal interest in 
the fortunes of both ; as in Balzac's Pere Goriot, it is the 
pitiless selfishness of his three daughters on the one 
hand, and the doting self-denial of the poor old father 



128 FAMOUS SCOTS 

on the other, that throws both sets of characters into 
relief so strong : so, in The Gentle Shepherd, it is the 
subtle force of the contrast between Patie's well-balanced 
manliness and justifiable pride, and Roger's gauche 
bashfulness and depression in the face of Jenny's 
coldness ; between Peggy's piquant lovableness and 
maidenly joy in the knowledge of Patie's love, and 
Jenny's affected dislike to the opposite sex to conceal 
the real state of her feelings towards Roger in particular, 
that impart to the poem the vivid interest wherewith its 
scenes are perused. Minor contrasts are present too, 
in the faithfulness of Patie to Peggy, as compared with 
the faithlessness of Bauldy to Neps. The whole drama, 
in fact, might be styled a beautiful panegyric on fidelity 
in love. Such passages as the following are frequent — 

' I'd hate my rising fortune, should it move 
The fair foundation of our faithfu' love. 
If at my feet were crowns and sceptres laid 
To bribe my soul frae thee, delightful maid, 
For thee I'd soon leave these inferior things 
To sic as have the patience to be kings.' 

As a pastoral poet, Ramsay excels in painting all those 

homely virtues that befit the station to which most of his 

characters belonged. A fault, and a serious one, it was 

among the writers of conventional pastoral, to make their 

shepherds and shepherdesses talk like philosophers, and 

reason upon all the mysteries of life, death, and futurity. 

What reader of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, but must 

have smiled over the shepherds in that delicious romance 

discussing love, and treating of its metaphysical causes 

and effects, as profoundly as any 

' clerke of Oxenforde also 

Who unto logik hadde long y-go.' 



ALLAN RAMSAY 129 

The extravagances of conventional pastoral had been 
keenly satirised by Gay, who made his Lobbin Clouts 
and Cloddipoles, his Blowzalinds and Bowzabees and 
Bumkinets, in the Shepherd's Week, < talk the language 
that is spoken neither by country maiden nor courtly 
dame ; nay, not only such as in the present time is not 
uttered, but never was in times past, and, if I judge 
aright, will never be uttered in times future.' But by 
Ramsay the silliness of the prevailing mode, both of 
British and French pastoral, was more aptly satirised, by 
presenting, as a contrast, a picture of rural life absolutely 
truthful in all its details, and thus slaying falsehood by 
the sword of truth. 

Of The Gentle Shepherd, the plot is simplicity itself. 
It describes the love of a young Pentland shepherd 
named Patie for a country maiden named Peggy. The 
pastoral drama, the time of whose action is all embraced 
within four -and -twenty hours, thus preserving one, at 
least, of the Greek dramatic unities as defined by 
the French critics, opens at early morning with the 
two young shepherds, Patie and Roger, feeding their 
flocks on the hills, and discussing the progress of 
their love -suits. The scene is charmingly realistic 
and natural. Patie is happy in his love for Peggy 
who reciprocates it ; Roger, in despair over his ill- 
success with ' dorty Jenny.' His friend, however, 
raises his spirits by telling him how he once served 
Peggy when she had a fit of tantrums, by feigning 
indifference to her, a course which soon brought the 
fair one to reason. He exhorts Roger to adopt the 
same line, conveying his counsel in the following 
terms, that contain excellent advice to young lovers, 
9 



130 FAMOUS SCOTS 

and might have given a hint to Burns for his song, 
c Duncan Gray ' — 

' Dear Roger, when your jo puts on her gloom, 
Do ye sae too, and never fash your thumb ; 
Seem to forsake her, soon she'll change her mood ; 
Gae woo anither, and she'll gang clean wood.' 

Roger agrees to take the advice, and the scene concludes 
with a delightful picture of a shepherd's meal — 

' But first we'll tak a turn up to the height, 
And see gif all our flocks be feeding right ; 
By that time, bannocks and a shave of cheese 
Will make a breakfast that a laird might please, — 
Might please the daintiest gabs, were they sae wise 
To season meat with health instead of spice. 
When we have ta'en the grace-drink at this well, 
I'll whistle syne ' — 

The second scene opens with an exquisite description of 

'A flowrie howm between twa verdant braes, 
Where lasses use to wash and spread their claes ; 
A trottin' burnie wimpling through the ground, 
Its channel, pebbles, shining, smooth and round. 
Here view twa barefoot beauties, clean and clear.' 

These are Peggy and Jenny. The latter proposes to 
begin their work on the ' howm ' or green in question, 
but Peggy entreats her to 

' Gae farer up the burn to Habbie's How, 
Where a' that's sweet in spring and simmer grow ; 
Between twa birks out o'er a little linn 
The water fa's, and makes a singin' din ; 
A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass, 
Kisses wi' easy whirles the bordering grass. 
We'll end our washing while the morning's cool, 
And when the day grows het we'll to the pool, 
There wash oursels ; 'tis healthfu' now in May, 
And sweetly cauler on sae warm a day.' 



ALLAN RAMSAY 131 

The girls then enter on a discussion regarding Jenny's 
cruel indifference to Roger. The maiden, who by the 
way is a bit of a prude, affects to despise love and 
marriage, but in the end, overcome by Peggy's beautiful 
description of conjugal happiness, is obliged to confess 
her love for Roger. What more delightful picture of 
maternal yearning over the young have we in all English 
literature, than Peggy's splendid defence of motherhood? — 

' Yes, it's a heartsome thing to be a wife, 
When round the ingle-edge young sprouts are rife. 
Gif I'm sae happy, I shall have delight 
To hear their little plaints, and keep them right. 
Wow, Jenny ! can there greater pleasure be, 
Than see sic wee tots toolying at your knee ; 
When a' they ettle at, — their greatest wish, 
Is to be made of and obtain a kiss? 
Can there be toil in tenting day and night 
The like of them, when love makes care delight?' 

The first scene of the Second Act opens with a 
picture of a peasant farmer's • onstead ' ; to wit, his 
dwelling and outhouses — 

1 A snug thack-house ; before the door a green ; 
liens on the midden, ducks in dubs are seen ; 
On this side stands a barn, on that a byre : 
A peat stack joins, and forms a rural square.' 

Here the neighbours, Glaud and Symon, meet. The 
latter has been into Edinburgh to sell his 'crummock 
and her bassened quey,' and over their pipes he informs 
his friend that their landlord, Sir William Worthy, who, 
as a Royalist, had been compelled to go into exile during 
the Commonwealth, would now, owing to the Restoration, 
be able to return home again, when all would be well. 
Symon has heard the news from the laird's servant, 



132 FAMOUS SCOTS 

' Habbie,' after whom the ' How ' or house is named. 
Glaud is so overjoyed at the news that he seeks to 
persuade Symon to remain and dine with him, offering, 
for it was before the age of good roads and carts, 

' To yoke my sled, and send to the neist town 
And bring a draught o' ale baith stout and brown.' 

But Symon wishes to exercise hospitality himself, and 
insists upon Glaud, his sister Madge, his daughter Jenny, 
and his niece Peggy, all dining with him, in honour of 
the day. This they are to do. We have here presented 
a graphic picture of rural fare on fete-days — 

' For here yestreen I brewed a bow of maut, 
Yestreen I slew twa wethers prime and fat. 
A furlet of good cakes, my Elspa beuk, 
And a large ham hangs reesting in the neuk. 
I saw mysel', or I cam o'er the loan, 
Our muckle pot that scads the whey, put on, 
A mutton- bouk to boil, and ane we'll roast ; 
And on the haggies Elspa spares nae cost. 
Small are they shorn, and she can mix fu' nice 
The gusty ingans wi' a cum of spice ; 
Fat are the puddings, — heads and feet weel sung.' 

The second scene introduces a new element into the 
drama. Another shepherd, Bauldy (Archibald) by name, 
has also been smitten with Peggy's charms — and it affords 
an excellent idea of the simplicity of these rural districts 
in Scotland, when he repairs to a poor old woman 
named Mause, whom the district reputes to be a witch, 
to entreat her aid in turning Peggy's heart towards 
himself. Bauldy's picture of Peggy, in his soliloquy, is 
beautiful in its very simplicity — 

' O Peggy ! sweeter than the dawning day, 
Sweeter than gowany glens or new-mawn hay ; 



ALLAN RAMSAY 133 

Blyther than lambs that frisk out o'er the knowes, 

Straighter than aught that in the forest grows. 

Her een the clearest blob of dew out-shines, 

The lily in her breast its beauty tines ; 

Her legs, her arms, her cheeks, her mouth, her een, 

Will be my deid ' — 

The existence of superstition among the Scottish 
peasantry, a state of things lasting until well on into last 
century, is also well brought out in Bauldy's soliloquy, 
when he refers to Mausy, ' a witch that for sma' price, 
can cast her cantrips, and gie me advice.' Mause, 
meaning to read the faithless lover of Neps a lesson, 
consents to help him. The fourth scene of the Second 
Act is undoubtedly one of the finest in the drama — the 
meeting of the lovers, Patie and Peggy. The two great 
constituents of a successful piece, strength and pathos, 
are both present in rich measure. To test her lover's 
fidelity, the maiden, with coy coquetry, affects to think 
that he might alter his mind and deceive her if she 
trusted him too implicitly. To this Patie replies that 
she deeply wrongs him in doubting his fidelity, and 
that he would be dull and blind 

1 Gif I could fancy aught's sae sweet and fair 
As my sweet Meg, or worthy of my care. 
Thy breath is sweeter than the sweetest brier, 
Thy cheek and breast the finest flowers appear, 
Thy words excel the maist delightfu' notes 
That warble through the merle or mavis' throats ; 
"With thee I tent nae flowers that busk the field, 
Or ripest berries that our mountains yield ; 
The sweetest fruits that hing upon the tree 
Are far inferior to a kiss frae thee.' 

With all a loving woman's sweet perversity, however, 
Peggy still affects to doubt, only to be indulged 



134 FAMOUS SCOTS 

in the delicious bliss of hearing her lover's vows 
anew — 

' Sooner a mother shall her fondness drap, 
And wrang the bairn sits smiling in her lap ; 
The sun shall change, the moon to change shall cease ; 
The gaits to climb, the sheep to yield the fleece ; 
Ere aught by me be either said or done 
Shall do thee wrang; — I swear by all aboon.' 

In no scene does Ramsay exhibit his wonderful know- 
ledge of the human heart to such advantage as in the 
one before us. Peggy and Patie then sing a duet, taking 
alternate verses, into which are introduced many of the 
old Scots songs, — 'The Broom o' Cowdenknowes,' 
'Milking the Ewes,' 'Jenny Nettles,' 'Thro' the 
Wood, Laddie,' 'The Boatman,' 'Maggie Lauder,' 
'The Lass o' Patie's Mill,' and the curtain falls over 
one of the most delightful scenes illustrative of pure 
affection, in modern drama. 

The Third Act sees the return of Sir William Worthy, 
who, in the disguise of a wizard, introduces himself into 
the company, merry-making at Symon's. Here he tells 
Patie's fortune, and the surprising discovery is ere long 
made that the youth is Sir William's only son, placed 
under Symon's care when the knight had to go into 
exile on the execution of Charles I. The description of 
the little festivity at Symon's is well wrought out. The 
third scene contains the love-making of Jenny and 
Roger, where the faithful swain's happiness is rendered 
complete. With great gusto Ramsay paints this episode, 
as well as with consummate fidelity to nature, — a fact 
becoming increasingly apparent when one notes the 
marked difference between the love - scene wherein 



ALLAN RAMSAY 135 

Patie and Peggy take part, and that wherein Jenny 
declares her love for Roger. The latter scene is 
more decidedly tinged with rusticity than the former. 
In the fourth scene Sir William reveals himself to 
Symon, and inquires eagerly about the progress made 
by his son during his years of absence. Symon 
praises the youth's devotion to letters, and then hints 
at his love for Peggy, which Sir William declares must 
be forgotten. 

The first scene of the Fourth Act relieves, by the 
introduction of humorous episodes, the sentimentality 
whereinto the drama at this stage shows signs of lapsing. 
Mause, Madge, and Bauldy have an interview, at which 
the two last named come to blows ; and when Bauldy 
has taken himself off, the two women perfect their plans 
for playing on the foolish fellow's superstitious fears. 
The remainder of the Fourth Act deals with Patie's 
sorrow and Peggy's anguish when Sir William's decision 
is made known. Of course, they vow everlasting fidelity 
to each other. The scene between the lovers is a very 
powerful one, wherein Ramsay evinced his sway over 
the subtler emotions. Yet here, as elsewhere, his 
simplicity constitutes his strength. He never attempts 
to depict any complex interaction of human passions. 
Like ^Eschylus, he contents himself with the repre- 
sentation of one elemental emotion at a time, and 
he thoroughly exhausts the one ' moment' before he 
passes on to another. Few passages are there in 
literature more genuinely pathetic, yet keeping more 
rigidly within the modesty of nature, than that 
wherein poor Peggy, after dwelling on the golden 
past, tries to picture the dull grey round of duty 



136 FAMOUS SCOTS 

in^the future when Patie shall have been taken from 
her — 

'Speak on, speak ever thus, and still my grief; 
But short, I dare to hope the fond relief. 
New thoughts a gentler face will soon inspire, 
That with nice airs swims round in silk attire ; 
Then I, poor me ! with sighs may ban my fate, 
When the young laird's nae mair my heartsome Pate. 
Nae mair again to hear sweet tales expresst 
By the blyth shepherd that excelled the rest, — 
Nae mair be envied by the tattling gang 
When Patie kissed me when I danced or sang ; 
Nae mair, alake ! we'll on the meadows play, 
And rin half-breathless round the rucks of hay, 
As aft-times I have fled from thee right fain, 
And fa'n on purpose, that I might be tane.' — 

But Patie reiterates his vows to her, and Peggy, comforted, 
declares she will set herself to learn 'gentler charms, 
through ilka school where I may manners learn.' Patie 
applauds her resolution, but declares that 

'without a' the little helps of art 

Thy native sweets might gain a prince's heart, 

Yet now, lest in our station we offend, 

We must learn modes to innocence unken'd.' 

The scene closes with Peggy's vows of fidelity. In this 
scene Ramsay touched the high-water mark of his genius, 
and for the elements of simplicity, strength, and pro- 
priety of the sentiments expressed by each character 
with the root-idea of that character, it is rivalled by very 
few scenes of its kind in the literature of our land. 

The first scene of the last Act opens with Bauldy's 
fright. He had gone to fulfil his engagement to meet 
Mause, the pretended witch, who was to turn Peggy's 
heart to him. But as he had insulted Madge, Peggy's 



ALLAN RAMSAY 137 

aunt, in the fore part of the day, the latter, to punish 
him by taking advantage of his dread of ghosts, meets 
him at the dead hour of the night when he is repairing 
to Mause's cottage. She is draped in a white sheet, 
and utters ghastly groans. Bauldy, having sunk terror- 
stricken to the ground, is soundly cuffed and trounced 
by the two women. As soon, therefore, as daylight 
breaks, he seeks an interview with Sir William to entreat 
redress. The latter, who had been passing the night in 
Symon's house, enters fully into the spirit of the joke, 
and orders Mause to be brought before him. 

The second scene exhibits Glaud's 'onstead' again, 
and the family preparing to go down to Symon's to 
take their leave of Patie. Peggy is very sad, — so much 
so that her sharp - tongued aunt cannot refrain from 
jeering at it — 

' Poor Meg ! — Look, Jenny, was the like e'er seen ? 
How bleared and red wi' greetin' look her een ! 
This day her brankan wooer taks his horse 
To strut a gentle spark at Edinburgh Cross. 
But Meg, poor Meg ! maun wi' the shepherds stay, 
And tak what God will send in hodden gray.' 

To this ill-timed speech Peggy makes a pathetic reply, 
that must have caused a pang of remorse to her aunt. 
But when Glaud ventures to warn her against being too 
free with Patie, seeing he could not marry her now, she 
replies with gentle reproach — 

' Sir William's virtuous, and of gentle blood ; 
And may not Patrick too, like him, be good?' 

Glaud's answer exhibits the simple faith of the rural 

inhabitants of the district in a striking light — 

'That's true and mony gentry mae than he, 
As they are wiser, better are than we ; 



138 FAMOUS SCOTS 

But thinner sawn : they're sae pufft up wi' pride, 
There's mony o' them mocks ilk haly guide 
That shows the gate to heav'n. I've heard mysel 
Some of them laugh at doomsday, sin, and hell.' 

The last scene of the pastoral contains the denouement. 
With great artistic skill, so as to avoid wearying the 
reader, Ramsay only represents the delivering of the 
verdict upon Bauldy's appeal against Mause, the result 
being that the former was informed he only got what he 
deserved. At this moment, however, Madge, Peggy, 
and Jenny enter the room where Sir William was sitting. 
On Peggy Sir Williams gazes with interest, but presently 
starts with surprise. Her features are those of his long- 
dead sister. Eagerly he inquires from Glaud if she be 
his daughter. Glaud, after some hesitation, declares her 
to be a foundling. At this juncture, however, old Mause 
steps forward and unravels the tangled skein. She first 
calls on Sir William to say if he does not recall her 
features as his own old nurse. Sir William joyfully 
recognises her, and then she relates how she had brought 
Peggy as a babe thither, to save its life from those who 
had usurped its rights after his sister's death. She 
declares that Peggy is indeed his own niece, and Patie's 
full cousin. 

Patie's joy is now complete, and the two lovers, their 
prospective union blessed by Sir William, fall into one 
another's arms; while the happiness of the shepherds 
and rustics is consummated when Sir William, restored 
to his possessions, announces his intention never more 
to leave them. To Symon and Glaud he assigns their 
mailings (farms) in perpetual feu, while Roger is made 
his chamberlain. As the curtain then descends over 



ALLAN RAMSAY 139 

general happiness, Sir William pronounces the usual 

moral admonition, without which no pastoral of the time 

was complete — 

' My friends, I'm satisfied you'll all behave, 
Each in his station as I'd wish and crave. 
Be ever virtuous, soon or late ye'll find 
Reward and satisfaction to your mind. 
The maze of life sometimes looks dark and wild, 
And oft when hopes are highest we're beguiled ; 
Oft when we stand on brinks of dark despair 
Some happy turn with joy dispels our care.' 

The ielative proportions of the various characters 
have been preserved with rare skill, and the individuality 
of each is as firmly and clearly differentiated in a few 
rapid incisive strokes, as though he had expended pages 
of description on each, like Pope and Gay. Patie's 
cheery botihomie and vivacious nature, his love of 
learning and his wise views of life and its duties, find 
an excellent foil in the slow, bashful, phlegmatic Roger, 
whose very 'blateness' denies him the bliss he covets 
in Jenny's love. Peggy is altogether charming, — a lovely, 
pure-souled, healthful, sport-loving maiden, with enough 
of her sex's foibles in her to leave her a very woman, 
yet with as few faults as it is possible for faulty human 
nature to be without. One of the most delightful 
heroines in pastoral poetry is Peggy. Jenny's prudish 
airs and affected dislike to the sterner sex are delicately 
yet incisively portrayed, while the staunch fidelity of 
Symon, the cheery chirpiness of Glaud, the bucolic 
ignorance and superstition of Bauldy, the cankered 
impatience of Madge — a spinster against her will, and 
the pathetic, age-worn weariness of Mause, are depicted 
with the assured hand of a master. Many of the lyrics 



140 FAMOUS SCOTS 

interspersed throughout the pastoral are gems of rustic 
song ; not high-class poetry, otherwise they would have 
been as out of place as would the Johnsonian minnows, 
talking, as Goldsmith said, like whales. 

Only to one other production of Ramsay's genius will 
attention be called under this head, namely, his continua- 
tion of James the First's poem, Christ's Kirk on the 
Green. Of this, the first canto only was written by its 
royal author. Ramsay, therefore, conceived the design 
of completing it, as was remarked before. The king 
had painted with great spirit the squabble that arose 
at a rustic wedding at Christ's Kirk, in the parish of 
Kinnethmont, in that part of the county of Aberdeen 
near Leslie called the Garioch. Ramsay seems to have 
mistaken it for Leslie in Fife. Two cantos were added 
by our poet to the piece, in the one of which he exhibited 
the company, their differences ended, as engaging in 
feasting and good cheer ; in the other, their appearance 
the following morning, after they had slept off the effects 
of the orgies, and when they proceed to the bridegroom's 
house to offer gifts. The skill wherewith Ramsay dove- 
tailed his work into that of his royal predecessor, and 
developed the king's characters along lines fully in accord 
with their inception, is very remarkable. There is a 
Rabelaisian element in the headlong fun and broad 
rough - and - tumble humour Ramsay introduces into 
his portion of the poem, but it is not discordant with 
the king's ideas. The whole piece is almost photo- 
graphic in the vividness of the several portraits; the 
'moment' of delineation selected for each being that 
best calculated to afford a clue to the type of character. 
The following picture of the 'reader,' or church pre- 



ALLAN RAMSAY 141 

centor in Roman Catholic times, has often been admired, 
as almost Chaucerian, for its force and truth — 

' The latter-gae of haly rhime, 
Sat up at the boord head, 
And a' he said 'twas thought a crime 

To contradict indeed. 
For in clerk lear he was right prime, 

And could baith write and read, 
And drank sae firm till ne'er a styme 
He could keek on a bead 

Or book that day.' 

The coarseness of the pieces cannot be denied. Still, 
withal, there is a robust, manly strength in the ideas 
and a picturesque force in the vocabulary that covers 
a multitude of sins. His picture of morning has often 
been compared with that of Butler in Hudibras, but 
the advantage undoubtedly lies with Ramsay. Butler 
describes the dawn as follows — 

' The sun had long since in the lap 
Of Thetis taken out his nap, 
And, like a lobster boil'd, the morn 
From black to red began to turn.' 

Ramsay, in his description, says — 

' Now frae th' east neuk o' Fife the dawn 
Speel'd westlines up the lift ; 
Carles wha heard the cock had crawn, 

Begoud to rax and rift ; 
And greedy wives, wi' girning thrawn, 

Cry'd "Lasses, up to thrift"; 
Dogs barked, and the lads frae hand 
Bang'd to their breeks like drift, 
Be break o' day.' 

It must be remembered, the poem was addressed to 
rustics, who would neither have understood nor 
appreciated anything of a higher or less broadly 



142 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Hogarthian nature. In Christ's Kirk on the Green 
we have stereotyped to all time a picture of manners 
unsurpassed for vigour and accuracy of detail, to which 
antiquarians have gone, and will go, for information that 
is furnished in no other quarter. 

In his elegies pure and simple, namely, those divested 
of any humorous element, Ramsay has done good work ; 
but it is not by any means on a par with what is expected 
from the poet who could write The Gentle Shepherd. A 
painter of low life in its aspects both humorous and 
farcical was Ramsay's distinctive metier. Pity it was 
his vanity and ambition ever induced him to turn aside 
from the path wherein he was supreme. His 'Ode to 
the Memory of Lady Mary Anstruther,' that to 'the 
Memory of Lady Garlies,' the one to Sir John 
Clerk on the death of his son James Clerk, and the 
'Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Forbes of Newhall,' are 
his best elegies. The versification is correct, the ideas 
expressed are sympathetically tender, poetic propriety and 
the modesty of nature are not infringed by any exaggerated 
expressions of grief, but the glow of genius is lacking, 
and the subtle union of sentiment and expression that 
are so prominent features in his greater poem. 

His two finest efforts as an elegist were his Ode to 
the Memory of Mrs. Forbes, beginning — 

' Ah, life ! thou short uncertain blaze, 
Scarce worthy to be wished or loved, 
Why by strict death so many ways, 
So soon, the sweetest are removed ! 

If outward charms and temper sweet, 
The cheerful smile, the thought sublime, 

Could have preserved, she ne'er had met 
A change till death had sunk with time ; ' 



ALLAN RAMSAY 143 

also the one on the Death of Sir Isaac Newton, wherein 
occur two memorable stanzas — 

' Great Newton's dead ! — full ripe his fame ; 
Cease vulgar grief, to cloud our song: 
We thank the Author of our frame, 
Who lent him to the earth so long. 

For none with greater strength of soul 
Could rise to more divine a height, 

Or range the orbs from pole to pole, 
And more improve the human sight.' 

His 'humorous elegies,' written in a mock heroic 
strain, and sometimes upon persons still living, though, 
for the purposes of his art, he represented them as dead, 
as in the case of John Cowper, are instinct with broad, 
rollicking, Rabelaisian fun. Their vivid portrayal of 
the manners and customs of the time renders them 
invaluable. What better description of the convivial 
habits of Edinburgh society early last century could be 
desired, than the graphic pictures in Luckie Wood's Elegy, 
particularly the stanza — 

' To the sma' hours we aft sat still, 
Nick'd round our toasts and sneeshin'-mill ; 
Good cakes we wanted ne'er at will, 

The best of bread ; 
Which aften cost us mony a gill 
To Aitkenhead. ' 

Than his elegies on Luckie Spence, John Cowper, and 
Patie Birnie, no more realistic presentation of low-life 
manners could be desired. They are pictures such as 
Hogarth would have revelled in, and to which he alone 
could have done justice in reproduction. 



CHAPTER XI 

RAMSAY AS A SATIRIST AND A SONG-WRITER 

Difficult it is to make any exact classification of 
Ramsay's works, inasmuch as he frequently applied 
class-names to poems to which they were utterly inapplic- 
able. Thus many of his elegies and epistles were 
really satires, while more than one of those poems he 
styled satires were rather of an epic character than 
anything else. By the reader, therefore, certain short- 
comings in classification must be overlooked, as 
Ramsay's poetical terminology (if the phrase be per- 
missible) was far from being exact. 

As I have previously remarked, Ramsay's studies 
in poetry, in addition to the earlier Scottish verse, 
had lain largely in the later Elizabethan, Jacobean, and 
Caroline periods. In these, Milton, Cowley, Dryden, and 
Pope were his favourites, and their influence is to be 
traced throughout his satires. To Boileau he had paid 
some attention, though his acquaintance with French 
literature was more through the medium of translations, 
than by drawing directly from the fountainhead. 
Ramsay's satires exhibit all the virtues of correct 
mediocrity. Their versification is smooth, and they 
generally scan accurately : the ideas are expressed 
pithily, at times epigrammatically and wittily. The 



ALLAN RAMSAY 145 

faults and foibles satirised in most cases are those that 
richly merited the satiric lash. Yet, all these merits 
granted, the reader feels something to be lacking. The 
reason is not far to seek. Ramsay never felt at home 
in what may be termed 'polished satire.' He was as 
much out of place as would a low comedian on being 
suddenly called upon to undertake 'drawing-room 
comedy.' Perpetually would he feel the inclination to 
rap out one of the rousing, though vulgar, jokes that 
inevitably evoked a roar of applause from the gallery, 
and sooner or later he would give way to it. Ramsay 
was in precisely the same position. The consequence 
is that in the Morni?ig Interview, professedly an imita- 
tion of Pope's Rape of tbe Lock, there are incongruous 
images introduced, for the purpose of relieving the piece 
by humorous comparisons, which offend the taste even 
of the most cursory reader. Such allusions as that to 
c soft fifteen on her feet-washing night,' and others of a 
cognate character, are entirely out of place in ' polished 
satire.' If he attempted the type of composition, he 
ought to have conformed to its rules. 

Of course, Ramsay wrote certain satires, The Last 
Speech of a Wretched Miser and the like, in the Scots 
vernacular, and addressed to the lower classes in the 
community, where his genius is seen at its best, because 
dealing with ' low-life satire ' and the types of character 
he loved most of all to paint. But his Wealth or the 
Woody, his Health— 2, poem addressed to Lord Stair, 
his Scribblers Lashed, The General Mistake, The Epistle 
to Lord Ramsay, and the Rise and Fall of Stocks in 1720, 
exhibit Ramsay's genius moving in fetters. His touch 
lacks piquancy and epigrammatic incisiveness, — lacks, too, 
10 



146 famous scots 

that determinate deftness so characteristic of Horace, 
as well as those subtle nuances of double-meaning 
wherein Pope and Arbuthnot excelled, and of which the 
latter's terrible ' Epitaph on Colonel Chartres ' is a 
favourable example. Ramsay hits with the hammer of 
Thor, when he should tap as lightly as 'twere reproof 
administered by a fair one with her fan. Witness his 
portrait of Talpo in Health — a poem in many respects 
one of Ramsay's best. With what airy satiric touches 
Pope or Gay would have dashed off the character. 
Note the laboured strokes wherewith Ramsay produces 
his picture — 

' But Talpo sighs with matrimonial cares, 
His cheeks wear wrinkles, silver grow his hairs, 
Before old age his health decays apace, 
And very rarely smiles clear up his face. 
Talpo's a fool, there's hardly help for that, 
He scarcely knows himself what he'd be at. 
He's avaricious to the last degree, 
And thinks his wife and children make too free 
With his dear idol ; this creates his pain, 
And breeds convulsions in his narrow brain. 
He's always startled at approaching fate, 
And often jealous of his virtuous mate ; 
Is ever anxious, shuns his friends to save : 
Thus soon he'll fret himself into a grave ; 
There let him rot' — 

But Ramsay's distinguishing and saving characteristic 
in satire was the breadth and felicity of his humour. 
To satire, however, humour is less adapted than wit, 
and of wit Ramsay had, in a comparative sense, but a 
scanty endowment. He was not one of those who 
could say smart things, though he could depict a 
humorous episode or situation as felicitously as anyone 



ALLAN RAMSAY 147 

of his age. Like Rabelais, he was a humorist, not a 

wit, and his satires suffered accordingly. Perhaps the 

best of his satires is The Last Speech of a Wretched 

Miser, wherein his humour becomes bitingly sardonic. 

The wretch's address to his pelf is very powerful — 

' O dool ! and am I forced to dee, 

And nae mair my dear siller see, 

That glanced sae sweetly in my e'e ! 

It breaks my heart ! 
My gold ! my bonds ! alackanie 
That we should part. 

Like Tantalus, I lang have stood, 
Chin-deep into a siller flood ; 
Yet ne'er was able for my blood, 

But pain and strife, 
To ware ae drap on claiths or food, 

To cherish life.' 

Different, indeed, is the case when we come to con- 
sider Ramsay as a song -writer and a lyrist. To him 
the former title rather than the latter is best applicable. 
This is not the place to note the resemblances and the 
differences between the French chanson, the German 
lied, the Italian canzone, and the English song or lyric. 
But as indicating a distinction between the two last 
terms, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, in the introduction to his 
invaluable Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, regards 
a 'lyric' as a poem turning on 'some single thought, 
feeling, or situation ' -, Mr. H. M. Posnett, in his 
thoughtful volume on Comparative Literature, remarks 
that the lyric has varied from sacred or magical hymns 
and odes of priest bards, only fulfilling their purpose 
when sung, and perhaps never consigned to writing at 
all, down to written expressions of individual feeling 
from which all accompaniments of dance or music have 



148 FAMOUS SCOTS 

been severed. But approximately defined, a lyric may 
be said to be a poem — short, vivid, and expressive of a 
definite emotion, appealing more to the eye than with 
any ultimate view of being set to music; a song, as a 
composition appealing more to the ear, wherein the 
sentiments are more leisurely expressed, with the inten- 
tion of being accompanied by music. Mr. E. H. 
Stoddard, in the preface to his English Madrigals, defines 
a lyric ' as a simple, unstudied expression of thought, 
sentiment, or passion ; a song, its expression according 
to the mode of the day.' The essence of a lyric is 
point, grace, and symmetry ; of a song, fluency, freedom, 
and the expression of sympathetic emotions. 

Ramsay, according to this basis of distinction, was, 
as has been said, rather a song -writer than a lyrist. 
The works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, and Massinger, abound in lyrics, but contain 
comparatively few songs, in the modern sense of the 
word, in which we speak of the songs of Burns, Moore, 
and Barry Cornwall. Ramsay, in his songs, sacrificed 
everything to mode. In nine cases out of ten he had 
the tune for the song in his mind when he was writing 
the words. In Scotland, as is well known, there is an 
immense body of music, some of it ancient, some of it 
comparatively modern, though none of it much later 
than the Restoration. That was the mine wherein 
Ramsay dug long and deep for the music for his Tea- 
Table Miscellany. To those ancient tunes he supplied 
words — words that to this day remain as a memorial 
of the skill and sympathy wherewith he wedded the 
spirit of the melodies to language in keeping with their 
national character. 



ALLAN RAMSAY 149 

To a soupcon of diffuseness the poet must, however, 
plead guilty — guilty, moreover, because of the invincible 
temptation to pad out a line now and then ' for crambo's 
sake ' when the ideas ran short. Ramsay possessed all 
the qualities constituting a song -writer of great and 
varied genius. His work exhibits ease and elasticity 
of rhythm, liquid smoothness of assonance, sympathetic 
beauty of thought, with subtle skill in wedding sense 
to sound. Though his verse lacked the dainty finish 
of Herrick and Waller, the brilliant facet-like sparkle of 
Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace, the tender grace of 
Sedley, and the half- cynical, half- regretful, but wholly 
piquant epicureanism, of Rochester and Denham, yet 
Ramsay had a charm all his own. Witness the ' Lass 
o' Patie's Mill'; is it not entirely sui generis} 

'The lass o' Patie's Mill, 

So bonny, blythe, and gay, 
In spite of all my skill, 

She stole my heart away. 
When tedding of the hay, 

Bareheaded on the green, 
Love midst her locks did play, 

And wantoned in her een. 

Her arms, white, round, and smooth, 

Breasts rising in their dawn, 
To age it would give youth 

To press 'em with his hand, 
Thro' all my spirits ran 

An ecstasy of bliss 
When I such sweetness fan' 

Wrapt in a balmy kiss. 

Without the help of art, 

Like flowers that grace the wild, 

She did her sweets impart 
Whene'er she spoke or smil'd. 



150 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Her looks they were so mild, 

Free from affected pride, 
She me to love beguiled, 

I wished her for my bride.' 

Take also 'Bessy Bell and Mary Gray'; what a 
rich fancy and charming humour plays throughout the 
piece, united to a keen knowledge of the human heart — 

'O* Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, 

They are twa bonny lasses; 
They bigg'd a bower on yon burnbrae, 

And theek'd it o'er with rashes. 
Fair Bessy Bell I loo'd yestreen, 

And thought I ne'er could alter; 
But Mary Gray's twa pawky e'en, 

They gar my fancy falter,' 

or that verse in his ' Scots Cantata,' with what simplicity, 
yet with what true pathos, is it not charged ? — 

'O bonny lassie, since 'tis sae, 

That I'm despised by thee, 
I hate to live ; but O, I'm wae, 

And unco sweer to dee. 
Dear Jeany, think what dowy hours 

I thole by your disdain : 
Why should a breast sae saft as yours 

Contain a heart of stane?' 

George Withers' famous lines, 'Shall I, wasting in 
despaire,' are not a whit more pathetic. Then if we 
desire humour pure and unadulterated, where can be 
found a more delightful //// than ' The Widow ' ? 

'The widow can bake, and the widow can brew, 
The widow can shape, and the widow can sew, 1 
And mony braw things the widow can do, — 
Then have at the widow, my laddie.' 

1 Pronounced in Scots, shoo. 



ALLAN RAMSAY 151 

Or if you affect a dash of satire in your songs, what more 
to your taste than — 

' Gi'e me a lass wi' a lump o' land, 

And we for life shall gang thegither, 
Though daft or wise I'll ne'er demand, 

Or black or fair it maks na whether. 
I'm aff wi' wit, and beauty will fade, 

And blood alane is no worth a shilling ; 
But she that's rich, her market's made, 

For ilka charm aboot her's killing.' 

Or if the reader desire the wells of his deepest sympathies 
to be stirred, what more truly pathetic than his 'Auld 
Lang Syne,' which supplied Burns with many of the 
ideas for his immortal song ; or his version of ' Lochaber 
No More' — 

' Farewell to Lochaber, and farewell my Jean, 
Where heartsome wi' thee I've mony day been ; 
For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more, 
We'll maybe return to Lochaber no more,' 

— a song than which to this day few are more popular 
among Scotsmen. As a song-writer Ramsay appeals to 
all natures and all temperaments. He was almost 
entirely free from the vice of poetic conventionality. 
He wrote what seemed to him best, undeterred by 
the dread of offending against poetic canons, or the 
principles of this, that, or the other school of poetry. 
He was a natural singer, not one formed by art — a 
singer, voicing his patriotic enthusiasm in many a lay, 
that for warmth of national feeling, for intense love of 
his species, for passionate expression of the tenderer 
emotions, is little behind the best of the songs of Robert 
Burns. Granted that his was not the power to sweep, 



152 FAMOUS SCOTS 

like Burns, or Beranger, or Heine, with masterful hand 
over the entire gamut of human passions ; that to him 
was not given, as to them, the supremely keen insight 
into the workings of the human heart, and the magical 
witchery of wedding sense to sound so indissolubly, that 
alter but a word in the texture of the lines and the 
poem is ruined. Yet, in his province, Ramsay was 
dowered with a gift but little less notable, that of 
portraying so faithfully the natural beauties of his 
country, and the special characteristics of his country- 
men, that, in a greater degree even than Burns, — 
were Ramsay's songs only recognised as his, in place 
of being ascribed to others, — he has a right to the 
proud title of Scotland's national song -writer. Not 
for a moment do I seek to place Ramsay on a 
pedestal co-equal with Burns — that were an error 
worse than folly; not for a moment do I seek to 
detract from the transcendent merit of our great 
national poet. But though I do not rate Burns 
the less, I value Ramsay the more, when I say that, 
had there been no Ramsay there might have been 
no Burns nor any Fergusson — at least, the genius 
of the two last named poets would not have found 
an adequate vehicle of expression lying readymade to 
their hand. Ramsay it was who virtually rendered 
the Scots vernacular a possible medium for the use 
of Burns ; and this service, unconsciously rendered 
by the lesser genius to the greater, is generously 
acknowledged by the latter, who could not but be 
aware that, as his own star waxed higher and yet 
higher from the horizon line of popularity, that of 
his elder rival waned more and more. Therefore his 



ALLAN RAMSAY 153 

noble panegyric on Ramsay is but a tribute to his 
'father in song' — 

'Thou paints auld nature to the nines, 
In thy sweet Caledonian lines ; 
Nae gowden stream through myrtle twines, 

"Where Philomel, 
While nightly breezes sweep the vines, 

Her griefs will tell. 

In gowany glens thy burnie strays, 
Where bonnie lassies bleach their claes ; 
Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes, 

Wi' hawthorns gray, 
Where blackbirds join the shepherd's lays 

At close o' day. 

Thy rural loves are nature's sel' ; 

Nae bombast spates o' nonsense swell ; 

Nae snap conceits, but that sweet spell 

O' witchin' love, 
That charm that can the strongest quell, 

The sternest move.' 



CHAPTER XII 

ramsay's miscellaneous poems; conclusion 

Our survey is now drawing to a close. To say a word 
upon those miscellaneous poems that do not fall naturally 
into any convenient category for classification is all that 
remains to be done. 

Already attention has been called to the poem on 
Content, when its purpose was sketched. Though con- 
taining many passages of no little power and beauty, yet 
as a whole it is heavy and uninteresting. Written 
during the time when the glamour of Pope's influence 
was upon Ramsay, it exhibits many of Pope's faults with- 
out his redeeming features. True, the characters are 
drawn with great vigour and distinctive individuality, but 
the trail of dulness lies over it, and Content slumbers, 
with James Thomson's chef aVoznvre on Liberty, on the 
top shelf amongst the spiders. The description of the 
palace of the goddess Content has, however, often been 
praised for its vigorous scene-painting — 

' Amidst the glade the sacred palace stood, 
The architecture not so fine as good ; 
Nor scrimp, nor gousty, regular and plain, 
Plain were the columns which the roof sustain ; 
An easy greatness in the whole was found, 
Where all that nature wanted did abound : 
154 



ALLAN RAMSAY 155 

But here no beds are screen'd with rich brocade, 
Nor fuel logs in silver grates are laid ; 
Nor broken China bowls disturb the joy 
Of waiting handmaid, or the running boy ; 
Nor in the cupboard heaps of plate are rang'd, 
To be with each splenetic fashion changed.' 

The Prospect of Plenty is another poem wherein 
Ramsay allows his reasoning powers to run away with 
him. As Chalmers remarks : ' To the chimerical hopes 
of inexhaustible riches from the project of the South Sea 
bubble, the poet now opposes the certain prospect of 
national wealth from the prosecution of the fisheries in 
the North Sea — thus judiciously pointing the attention 
of his countrymen to the solid fruits of patient industry, 
and contrasting these with the airy projects of idle 
speculation.' The poem points out that of industry the 
certain consequence is plenty, a gradual enlargement 
of all the comforts of society, the advancement of the 
useful, and the encouragement of the elegant arts, the 
cultivation of talents, the refinement of manners, the 
increase of population — all that contributes either to 
national prosperity or to the rational enjoyments of life. 
The composition and structure of the poem are less 
deserving of encomium than the wisdom of its precepts. 
Like Content, it is tedious and dull, yet there is one 
vigorous passage in it, beginning : ' A slothful pride ! a 
kingdom's greatest curse,' and dealing with the evils 
arising from the separation of the classes, which has 
often been quoted. Nor must we forget The Vision, 
which in the opinion of many must rank amongst the 
best of Ramsay's productions. Published originally in the 
Evergreen, over the initials ' A. R. Scot,' for some time 
it was believed to be the work of a Scots poet, Alexander 



156 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Scott, who lived in the reign of Queen Mary. But Janet 
Ramsay put the matter beyond a doubt before her death 
by declaring the poem to have been written by her 
father. The merits of The Vision are considerable. The 
language is majestic and dignified, the ideas lofty, and 
the characters drawn with vigour and precision. Had 
the spelling not been so archaic, the poem would have 
been much more popular than it is. 

For Horace, Ramsay always professed a deep admira- 
tion. Upon the style of the great Roman satirist he 
sought to model his ' Epistles,' which undoubtedly 
deserve something more than mere passing mention. 
In them Ramsay endeavours to give the friend, whom 
at the moment he addresses, a glimpse into the pursuits 
with which, for the time being, he was occupying him- 
self. Taking this for his text, he digresses into apt and 
amusing dissertations on any subject of public, municipal, 
or social interest that might be engrossing the attention 
of the town. His epistles to Hamilton of Gilbertfield, 
to James Arbuckle, to the Earl of Dalhousie, to Mr. 
Aikman, to Sir W. Bennet, to William Starrat, to Joseph 
Burchet, to Somerville the poet, to Gay, to Clerk of 
Penicuik, and others, are altogether delightful — happy, 
cheery, humorous, 'gossipy productions, neither too full 
of fun to be frivolous, nor too didactic to be tiresome. 
Take, for example, his epistle to Robert Yarde of Devon- 
shire, — how apt are his allusions, how racy his tit-bits of 
local news ! He addresses the epistle 

' Frae northern mountains clad with snaw, 
Where whistling winds incessant blaw, 
In time now when the curling-stane, 
Slides murm'ring o'er the icy plain ' ; 



ALLAN RAMSAY 157 

and he asks his correspondent how, under these 
conditions, 

' What sprightly tale in verse can Yarde 
Expect frae a cauld Scottish bard, 
With brose and bannocks poorly fed, 
In hodden gray right hashly clad, 
Skelping o'er frozen hags with pingle, 
Picking up peats to beet his ingle, 
While sleet that freezes as it fa's, 
Theeks as with glass the divot wa's 
Of a laigh hut, where sax thegither 
Lie heads and thraws on craps of heather ? ' 

— this being a humorous allusion to the prevalent 
idea in England at the time, that the Scots were 
only a little better off than the savages of the South 
Seas. 

Finally, in his translations, or rather paraphrases, from 
Horace, Ramsay was exceedingly happy. He made no 
pretensions to accuracy in his rendering of the precise 
words of the text. While preserving an approximation 
to the ideas of his original, he changes the local atmo- 
sphere and scene, and applies Horace's lines to the 
district around Edinburgh, wherewith he was so familiar. 
With rare skill this is achieved ; and while any lover of 
Horace can easily follow the ideas of the original, the non- 
classical reader is brought face to face with associations 
drawn from his own land as illustrative, by comparison 
and contrast, of the text of the great Roman. Few 
could have executed the task with greater truth • 
fewer still with more felicity. Already I have cited a 
portion of Ramsay's rendering of Horace's famous Ode, 
Vides nt a/fa stet nive candidum Soracte. There are 
two other stanzas well worthy of quotation. Ramsay's 



158 FAMOUS SCOTS 

rendering of the famous Carpe diem, etc., passage is 
all I have space for — 

' Let neist day come as it thinks fit, 
The present minute's only ours ; 
On pleasure let's employ our wit, 
And laugh at fortune's feckless powers.' 

Reference has also been made to his apt translation of 
the ideas contained in Horace's ist Ode to Maecenas, 
by making them express his own feelings towards Lord 
Dalhousie. Two of his aptest renderings of the original, 
however, were those of Horace's 18th Ode to Quintilius 
Varus {Nullam, Vare, sacra vite prius sevens ardorem), 
which our poet renders — 

1 Binny, cou'd thae fields o' thine 
Bear, as in Gaul, the juicy vine, 
How sweet the bonny grape wad shine 

On wa's where now 
Your apricock and peaches fine 

Their branches bow. 

Since human life is but a blink, 

Then why should we its short joys sink : 

He disna live that canna link 

The glass about ; 
Whan warm'd wi' wine, like men we think, 

An' grow mair stout.' 

The 31st Ode (B. 1.) to Apollo is thus felicitously 
rendered — 

' Frae great Apollo, poets say, 
What would'st thou wish, what wadst thou hae 

Whan thou bows at his shrine? 
Not Carse o' Gowrie's fertile field, 
Nor a' the flocks the Grampians yield 
That are baith sleek and fine ; 



ALLAN RAMSAY 159 

Not costly things, brocht frae afar, 
As iv'ry, pearl and gems ; 
Nor those fair straths that watered are 

Wi' Tay an' Tweed's smooth streams. 
Which gentily and daintily 
Eat down the flow'ry braes, 
As greatly and quietly 
They wimple to the seas.' 

Ramsay had the misfortune never to have studied the 
technique of his art, so that in no respect is he a master 
of rhythm. The majority of his longer poems, including 
The Gentle Shepherd, are written in the ordinary heroic 
measure, so popular last century because so easily 
manipulated. His songs for the most part are written in 
familiar metres, not calculated to puzzle any bonny 
singing Bess as she danced and lilted on the village 
green. As a metrist, therefore, Ramsay can claim little 
or no attention. His poetry was the spontaneous ebulli- 
tion of his own feelings, and for their expression he seized 
upon the first measure that came to hand. 

Such, then, is Ramsay ! In his matchless pastoral he 
will ever live in the hearts of Scotsmen ; and were proof 
needed, it would be found in the increasing numbers of 
pilgrims who year by year journey to Carlops to visit the 
scenes amongst which Peggy lived and loved. To any 
one save the historian and the antiquarian, the remainder 
of his poetry may now be of little value, — probably of 
none, — amidst the multifarious publications which day 
by day issue from the press. But by Scotsmen the 
memory of the gentle, genial, lovable Allan will ever be 
prized as that of one who, at a critical time, did more 
to prevent Scottish national poetry from being wholly 
absorbed by the mightier stream of English song than 



160 FAMOUS SCOTS 

any other man save Scott. Worthy of such veneration, 
then, is he, both as a poet and as a man ; and though the 
extravagant admiration wherewith he was regarded in his 
own day, has given place to a soberer estimate of his 
rank in the hierarchy of letters, yet Allan Ramsay can 
never be held as other than one of the most delightful, if 
he can no longer be rated as one of the greatest, of Scottish 
poets. That his immortal pastoral can ever be consigned 
to the limbo of oblivion is as improbable as that our 
posterity will forget Tarn o' Shanter and the Cotters 
Saturday Night. The opinion of Robert Burns regard- 
ing the permanence of his ' poetical forebear's ' fame will 
be cordially endorsed by every leal-hearted Scot, in whose 
memory the sturdy manliness of Patie and the winning 
beauty of Peggy are everlastingly enshrined — 

' Yes ! there is ane : a Scottish callan, 
There's ane ; come forrit, honest Allan, 
Thou needna jouk behint the hallan, 

A chiel' sae clever : 
The teeth o' time may gnaw Tantallan, 

But thou's for ever ! ' 



THE END. 



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